readability software

You may wish to add this to your list of readability tools. I've taken this from StyleWriter's documentation. I've been using StyleWriter for several months and the description appears to be accurate. StyleWriter was designed by two Canberra public servants who now live in the UK. There are UK, US and Australian versions. --PP

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Stylewriter: The Plain English Editor (Editor Software Pty Ltd, Editor Software (UK)Limited) contains over 25,000 patterns of words and phrases that identify the common style and usage problems found in most writing. StyleWriter compares these with the words and phrases in your letter or report. When it matches one of its patterns or a word or phrase, it shows you how to improve your writing from its database of editing advice messagees.

StyleWriter's Analysis

One of StyleWriter's most important features is its analysis of your writing. This has two parts: 
1. a statistical summary; and 
2. a category  summary

You can look at the Analysis before you look through your text to see what StyleWriter has found. It gives an overall picture of your writing and tells you how much editing you'll need to do.

1. Statistical Summary
StyleWriter's statistical summary displays two important measures of good writing--your average sentence length and your passive index and gives the following statistics about your document:

--total number of words
--total number of sentences
--total number of words in sentences
--total number of passive verbs
--your average sentence length
--your passive index score

The summary also tells you how good or bad your passive index and sentence average are. This assessment varies according to the writing task you select. The screen has a graph of your sentence length distribution so you can judge if you have used a good variation in sentence length and how many long sentences you have.

2. Category Summary

The Category Summary shows the number of pattern matches StyleWriter has found in each category and helps you identify where your writing problems lie. These matches are also highlighted in your text.

StyleWriter highlights common style faults:

--passive verbs
--hidden verbs
--complex words
--jargon/abstractions
--overused words
--legal words
--cliches
--business cliches
--redundancies
--tautologies
--overwriting
--foreign words

StyleWriter also highlights possible errors so you can edit your writing:

--misused words
--confused words
--use of hyphens
--sexist writing
--common misspellings
--American spelling (the US version offers 'Preferred spelling')
--grammar faults

StyleWriter also allows you to enter the words and phrases and advice covering the House Style rules of your organisation.


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Received on Thursday, 28 September 2000 08:28:15 UTC