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Editor helps you out where spell check fails, and it now supports Word
I first found (and bought) Editor back when I was editing English text for Gramlee. It's a unique, and pretty amazing, piece of software; its work starts where your spell checker stops. It catches all sorts of potential grammar and usage problems, and its alerts are informative enough for you to learn and make your own judgement call on whether or not you wish to change your text.
Editor is made by Elaine and John Thiesmeyer, who are professors of English and teachers of writing. As you will no doubt notice when using the program, they are indeed English professors and not coders. That means that, back when I was using Editor, it had no support for MS Word at all, and the whole interface was rather antiquated (the history page says that Editor has been under development since 1982). On the other side, the on-screen text and the documentation are a pleasure to read; the writing is far better than that of your run-of-the-mill technical documentation.
In fact, back when I was using it, I cobbled together a set of macros for Word and sent it to Serenity Software for their use as a gift (they were very nice about it). And now, two years later, a new version of the Editor has been released, and it has support for Word (full disclosure: Elaine and John tell me that some of my code is still in there, and they have even credited me in the documentation). The interface is still far from slick, at least according to the screenshot, but the amazing functionality more than makes up for it.
If you do any sort of serious writing, Editor is one fantastic piece of software. Its usage notes and the amount of control that you have over it leave After the Deadline far behind. For some specific examples of the kind of stuff it catches (taken from the product page), keep on reading after the fold.
- The police told him to seize and desist: should be "cease and desist."
- There are times where I feel despair: should be "times when."
- I was bored of the whole discussion: should be either "bored by" or "bored with."
- He brought me a cold glass of water: makes no sense. A glass of cold water?
- Our forbears explored this continent: homonym error; use "forebears."
As you can see, this is some pretty serious error catching. The program takes thought and judgement into account; it's not a "next, next, next" thing. You have to read the advice and decide whether or not you want to follow it, but in the end, it can certainly make you a better writer.
Comments
12
Subscribe to commentsjfjbAug 2nd 2010 6:12PM
interesting piece of software based on language normalization, not admitting any vernacular or slang from US or British original speech or translation, 'cause it doesn't work with any other 'English' ways of speaking, let alone French, German or Spanish. So there for multilingual penal colony convicts. Ah-ah-ah.
Anyway, this is quite deceptive (it doesn't like 'quite' either) for an artificial intelligence model which would be supposed to also take into account creativity and laxity (flexibility) of language (using, for example, euphemism, analogies, and eventual pertinent punctuation) as part of the writing process. Not counting on style itself, unless you're branching out of a computerized algorithm yourself.
Therefore, this is a no-no, unless it's about helping people learning a language.
Just try to copy and paste any Leo Tolstoy, Henry Miller, Jacques Derrida, Yasunari Kawabata, Jose Saramago, Jorge Luis Borges, Armistead Maupin, Will Shelf, Thomas Pynchon, William Shakespeare, Umberto Eco, Herman Hesse, Victor Hugo, Raymond Carver, Thomas Mann, Lord Byron, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Tompson, Madame de Sévigné, Alphonse Lamartime, Tenessee Williams, John Cheever, Paul Verlaine, Johann Goethe, Nicolai Gogol. Slavenka Drakulic, Ernest Hemingway even, or your mother's last letter.
You will have a ball at deciphering the logic behind the responses of this AI algorithm. It's almost as fun as reverse translation from a translation.
And yet, it does make sense. To a point.
My two-cents, as a writer.
P.S. I'm not sorry for the listing of writers you might not know about, but they didn't know about this either. :-))
jfjbAug 2nd 2010 6:19PM
P.S. But I will give it a try with OpenOffice. Thanks, Erez
jfjbAug 2nd 2010 6:40PM
too bad it doesn't provide tools for Windows client system...
PrestidigitatorAug 2nd 2010 11:30PM
The program takes thought and judgement into account: spelling error. Judgment.
iAug 3rd 2010 1:17AM
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/judgement
johannAug 3rd 2010 9:24AM
Interesting piece of software, doesn't seem to play nice with office 2010 just runs as an outside program from what I see. Unless that is what it is supposed to do? Regardless I let it run at a random ideas file. Some good ideas some not. I found this "suggestion" to be hilarious.
"POLISH
--looks for cliches, vagueness, and overused expressions.
hero
OVERUSED OR TRITE TERM especially in news writing"
really the word hero is trite? perhaps I should just call my character that guy who does good stuff because it's the right thing to do. I guess I'm not surprised seeing how the creators are English profs, they are probably very opinionated about the usage of words. I also noted that it hates the word "kid", insisting that it refers to goats rather than the common usage of today to refer to human children.
Doug BAug 3rd 2010 2:08AM
My writing teacher once said you need to learn the rules before you break them. This program doesn't substitute your creativity - aka breaking the rules.
Saint SeminoleAug 3rd 2010 12:06PM
Just to note that a "cold glass of water" makes as much sense as the suggested wording. The glass can be cold, the water can be cold, or both of them can be cold.
ProlornAug 3rd 2010 11:50PM
Typically, if one is cold, the other is most likely cold as well. Which is why their correction makes little sense to me.
I'm genuinely curious what the logic behind their "correction" was, especially since I can at least respect the other examples featured in the article.
SamAug 5th 2010 12:15AM
How do I get it to work with word 2007?
SamAug 5th 2010 1:06AM
Nevermind...
The readme was hard to find
Keyla HendrikAug 9th 2010 10:59PM
Using such devices is not really helpful for me. It's better to learn many English grammatical books and get negative comments from others as long as they are constructive one.