Stylewriter Review – Plain English Writing Software for Writers
May 13, 2009
StyleWriter integrates into Word and analyzes your manuscript for style and usage errors.
In this stylewriter review I’ll cover:
- Getting the software: how easy was it to access and start using a trial version of the software. There were some surprises here!
- Understanding the results: how easy was it to “get” what the program was telling me.
- Usefulness of the results: did the suggestions improve my writing?
- Price & Guarantee
I don’t bother repeating the marketing blurb from the product’s websites. You can go read about that on the individual websites (links are given). I focus solely on how well the software worked for me as a fiction writer trying to edit my manuscript.
No Free Trial!
StyleWriter does not offer a free trial version of the software. Instead, you can pay $30 and they will send you a trial version by post. They will discount the final price by $30 if you decide to buy.
I don’t know about you, but waiting a week or more for software to arrive by mail seems sort of….archaic? It made me wonder just how sophisticated the software really is if they can’t create a downloadable trial version. Anyway, enough griping. I received the software in the mail and installed it without any problem.
Understanding the Results
StyleWriter integrates with Word. After it analyzes your text, you can scroll through the results screen and evaluate each suggestion. In each case, I found the problem and the advice easy to understand.
StyleWriter provides some useful “global” information. For example, they provide a blunt ‘readability’ measure (average sentence length) and also have a ‘passive index’, which specifies if you are using too many passive verbs. Again, the information was easy to understand.
Usefulness of the Results
I found StyleWriter’s results more useful than WhiteSmoke, but not as useful as AutoCrit’s — mainly because AutoCrit is more targeted to fiction writers.
Comparing to other Software
StyleWriter’s goal is to cut words from your text, making it cleaner. This contrasts with WhiteSmoke’s goal which seems to be to add unnecessary words, like adverbs and adjectives. StyleWriter aligns more closely with my goal as a fiction writer to produce clean, tight writing.
Since StyleWriter is designed for all types of writing, it lacks fiction-specific suggestions. They even admit as such, stating “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. For advice specific to fiction, look to AutoCrit.
Even where they are most similar, I find AutoCrit more useful for my purposes. For example, both AutoCrit and StyleWriter analyze your writing for sentence variety. They use sentence length as the metric, but it is how they display their results that differs.
StyleWriter gives you a single graph that shows you how many sentences of each length are found in your text. But if you have too many long sentences, you have to search through your document to find them. With AutoCrit, you can see exactly where your long sentences are as review the sentence variety report. This could be just a personal preference. In both cases, the important information is conveyed.
Price & Guarantee
At $150, StyleWriter is the most expensive of the three editing programs I reviewed. It comes with a 35-day money-back guarantee.
Get StyleWriter Now
Summary
StyleWriter provides useful advice that can help you clean up your writing. It lacks advice specific to fiction writing, which is a short-coming compared to its competitors.
This is just my opinion! Find out more at the StyleWriter site and make up your own mind!
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