StyleWriter – the plain English editing style guide for Microsoft Word

About StyleWriter – how writing simply helps your sales and profits.

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.

As well as showing you how to write clearly and concisely, over the years we’ve developed the program to give you many benefits.

• Your documents will say the same but be around 25 percent shorter.
• Your word power and word knowledge will improve.
• You can add dozens of style issues you want to check.
• You can run style audits of teams or departments.
• You will find thousands of errors and style issues missed by Microsoft Word.
• You or your organization can develop and add your specific house style to StyleWriter.

The latest StyleWriter now checks your text for over a million issues.  It’s become the style guide for Microsoft Word users.