About StyleWriter
Many years ago I was working as head of public relations for a government agency. One day I offered to edit a manager’s report. I used my editing and proofreading skills to take his government-speak and turn it into plain English. The manager circulated the report and his colleagues praised the report for its lucid, clear style. From then on I was inundated with request to edit managers’ work.
It was the start of a campaign to improve writing style in the agency. We soon identified the core problem. Managers all followed a corporate style of jargon and management-speak. And because the managers used this convoluted style, their staff copied it as well. We were in a spiralling downward circle into gobbledygook.
We tried courses, we tried mentoring, we tried everything. Nothing produced long-term change. People reverted to their old writing habits. Then a junior public servant asked a simple question: If the spell-check can fix our typos, why can’t software fix our writing style? StyleWriter – the plain English editing style guide for Microsoft Word – became the solution that worked.
Now any writer, team, department or organization can use the StyleWriter solution and redraft any document into plain English. It works on a simple principle. It runs a sophisticated search and replace for over a million style issues. For example, here’s an example of turning business-speak into clear English.
