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Whitesmoke English Writing Software

White Smoke Writing Enhancement Software Review

December 23, 2008 | Comments Off

White smoke writing enhancement software works with a variety of applications including Microsoft Word and MSN messenger, so you can check your writing anytime and instantly modify your correspondence. White smoke program can also look for passive verbs, overused words, wordy phrases and more.

Although white smoke software is easy to use and works with numerous applications, we found some of the feedback incorrect or irrelevant. For example, some of the comments and edits offered included incorrect spelling and out of context suggestions. This product may be best for those that have a good basic understanding of English grammar, word usage and spelling, so they can make a proper selection from the suggested word lists.

White smoke writing enhancement software review

Editing Tools

White Smoke has a huge database of suggestions that consists of 6,007,005 enrichment corrections, 7,484,611 grammar corrections and 3,684,281 spelling corrections. When you submit your writing samples into the program it can check for spelling and grammar errors, punctuation, passive verbs, overused words and wordy phrases.

This software helps you enhance your text by providing adverb and adjective suggestions, much like the synonym tool in Word. This program cannot however evaluate the content or tense of a sentence, so it is ultimately up to you to decide which word fits the situation.

Reference Tools

White Smoke has a built in dictionary and thesaurus to help you choose applicable and effective words.

Additional Tools

White Smoke includes a diverse collection of templates, from business letters and proposals to love letters.

Applications

White smoke offers several programs for the application of your choice. We looked at the basic White Smoke Version but they also offer business, legal, medical, creative writing, dating and executive versions.

White Smoke can be used with Microsoft Word, Outlook, WordPerfect, HTML, any chat program and more.

Help/Support

White Smoke can be contacted by telephone, email or chat; however, we could not get their live chat to work. WhiteSmoke responded to our first email within 24 hours, but instead of answering our email they provided general sales information. We sent a second email with a list of questions and they responded within an hour with useful and relevant information.

Feedback

Toptenreviews.com tested three writing samples with this program, a business letter, a marketing devise or white paper and a technical document. However, much of the feedback was incorrect or inapplicable. In general, most of the suggestions did not extend beyond what a basic thesaurus can offer, without regard to content or tense.

When we put the white paper through the edit process, the feedback included some misleading comments and four obvious incorrect suggestions, such as we were prompted to change “used” to “used” and “supposing” to “supposed,” which would have made the sentence incorrect.

The program did offer some good feedback, but the toughest part would be discerning between a valid and invalid suggestion, especially if you are an inexperienced writer or an ESL student.

Summary

White Smoke works with a wide variety of software applications and offers the writer alternative word and grammar choices to enhance their writing. Nonetheless, we found the feedback to be misleading or incorrect.

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White Smoke English Writing & Proofreading Software Review

December 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment

First Impressions of White Smoke Proofreading Software

I found WhiteSmoke very easy to install and get started with. It checks the grammar, spelling and readability of everything that you write (it will do this whilst running in the background, or you can load up the program directly). It’s a bit like a very advanced and more intelligent version of Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checker.

I liked the way it automatically checked my typing in not only Microsoft Word but also in emails and when leaving comments using web forms. It caught a few potentially embarrassing typos before I had a chance to hit “send” or “submit”…

Testing white smoke

I tried running a few pieces of my regular writing through white smoke to see what it would say. This passage came from a piece I was writing for my blog The Office Diet:

Now you know what calories are and you know how to figure out how many are in your food … you just need to know how many you should be eating.

white smoke suggested putting a comma after the words “calories are”, and when I clicked to find out why, I was told:

Explanation: This sentence requires a comma to separate its clauses and improve clarity.
Definition: Two coordinated clauses should be divided by a comma.

So far so good: I agree that the sentence is improved when rewritten as:

Now you know what calories are, and you know how to figure out how many are in your food…

The next suggestion, however, was to put a full stop after “out” and before “how”, which would make the sentence:

Now you know what calories are and you know how to figure out. How many are in your food …

This time, when I asked why, white smoke explained “Two distinct sentences have to be divided by a full stop [period].” However, these were not two separate sentences, and putting a full stop here would lose meaning. I suspect the use of “figure out” (which is quite informal or colloquial) confused the software.

My frequent use of bullet points, rather than conventional paragraphs, also caused a few issues:

  • It suggested putting a period after the first bullet, but not after others. (Conventional advice is that you do not need to use periods for bullets consisting of short phrases, but if you do use periods, you should be consistent.)
  • white smoke believed that “Your weight” and “Your activity levels” should be “You’re weight” and “You’re activity levels” respectively. Again, I suspect the use of bullets and fragments rather than full sentences caused this confusion.

Sometimes, the software didn’t recognise what role a particular word was playing in a sentence. In the following example, the word “fast” is an adjective modifying “food”, but white smoke believed it was a verb:

They found that those who skipped breakfast tended to eat more fast food.

I was advised to “Change ‘more’ to ‘faster’”. I can understand where the confusion came – “more fast” would be poor grammar if the sentence was “I ran more fast than Billy.” But my sentence was correct as it stood.

Enrichment Suggestions

white smoke makes a number of enrichment suggestions which can help improve the flow or style of your writing. For example, one of these came up for me when it recommended changing “And” in:

And your muscle mass is also important

to “Furthermore”, “In addition”, or “Moreover”. I would probably have picked one of these if I’d been writing a more formal piece, but for a blog post, I don’t think starting with “And” is a problem.

Verdict

I enjoyed using the white smoke software, and found it was particularly good at spotting typos as I wrote. It could seem a little intrusive at times (a small window pops up in the right hand side of the screen as you type, when the software is running), so I usually turned it off when writing fiction or informal emails as I tended to get a lot of warnings about these!

There were a few occasional slips when the software didn’t understand the meaning of what I’d written, but so long as you don’t just accept every suggestion automatically, these infrequent mistakes shouldn’t cause too many problems.

I think it would be an excellent piece of software for:

  • People learning English as a foreign language
  • Students writing academic essays
  • Anyone producing a formal business-related piece (perhaps a report, or a job application)
  • Freelancers writing for print or traditional markets

You might find the white smoke software frustrating if:

  • You mainly write fiction or poetry (especially if you use a lot of dialogue or your style involves breaking grammatical rules)
  • Your emails and other non-fiction writing tend to be very informal
  • You use a lot of bullet points or other sentence fragments
  • You’re already very confident about your spelling and grammar

Overall, white smoke is a very easy to use, intuitive piece of software, and considerably cheaper than paying a proof-reader to check your work!

From: http://www.dailywritingtips.com/whitesmoke-software-review/

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