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StyleWriter FAQs |
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Who needs StyleWriter? |
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Just about anyone who writes. Research has shown:
- Managers claim that 80 percent of their employees lack good writing skills.
- Employees claim managers are poor writers, set bad examples and offer little guidance to improve their documents.
- Whole professions, lawyers, government officials, social scientists, computer technicians have reputations for bad writing and poor communication.
- But when people were asked if they had good writing and communications skills, everyone claimed they did!
StyleWriter is for anyone who writes, but is most useful for the typical office worker in business or government who has little or no training in good writing skills.
If you use a word processor, StyleWriter offers you better quality documents. StyleWriter is for anyone who writes:
- Advertisers for better ads, leaflets and press releases.
- Editors who want to use software to develop a house style.
- Journalists to check and polish their writing style.
- Judges for legal briefs to be just that - brief.
- Lawyers trying to break centuries of bad writing habits.
- Scientists who want to write clearly about complex issues.
- Social Scientists who want to sound human.
- Students wanting to get A-Grade essays.
- Technical Authors for shorter, readable documentation.
- You, if you want to learn the secrets of clear, direct language.
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Can StyleWriter solve all writing problems? |
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No program can claim to do that. StyleWriter assumes you can write a grammatical sentence. It does not duplicate your spelling checker - although it does offer advice on preferred spelling. Instead, StyleWriter concentrates on finding thousands of faults to teach you to work like a professional editor.
StyleWriter cannot think through your writing task for you or work out the best information to present to the reader or decide the best order to present it. Although there are help screens on these and hundreds of other writing issues, StyleWriter cannot tell if your content is good or bad. One reviewer summed it up well: "StyleWriter will show you how to write anything in a clear, concise and readable style. However, if you write nonsense, it will show you how to write clear, concise and readable nonsense."

However, StyleWriter is the best way to learn the art of good writing because it constantly applies good writing principles to your document. It offers a quick way to improve every document, but the greatest change in your writing comes after using StyleWriter for a few months. You'll find you automatically draft shorter, clearer and more effective documents as StyleWriter's philosophy of plain English becomes your way of thinking and writing.
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Should I follow all StyleWriter's Advice? |
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You do not have to make every change suggested by the program. Good editing means thinking about suggested changes, using common sense and deciding what's the best way to redraft the sentence. Although StyleWriter's advice reflects the accepted wisdom of many authorities on good writing, you will always need to have the final choice.
We've designed the program to help you how much editing you need to do. We separated the advice on style and usage.
We advise you edit as many of the style suggestions shown in dark red. You do not have to change the usage issues, shown in black, unless they are wrong. The best writing scores under 20-20-20 for the Style Index, Average Sentence Length and Passive Index. If you edit until you get three scores under 20 with excellent ratings, your writing style is fine and the one or two passive verbs and the occasional complex or abstract word will cause your readers little difficulty.

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What's the technical support? |
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Technical support is available to all single-user licence-holders by e-mail:
Separate technical support arrangements are available for large, corporate users. Contact Editor Software for more information.
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Still not sure? Click here to find out about our Software for Writers CD which includes a fully-working 30-Day trial of StyleWriter.
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