STYLEWRITER

StyleWriter – edit your writing and gain the Clear Writing Award

StyleWriter is our flagship product – designed to help everyone write in  clear, plain English.  We designed StyleWriter to put a plain English editor on every desk to show the authors how to write in clear, easy-reading style.  It changes the way business, government agencies and academia writes.  It breaks bad writing habits so common in workplace writing.

StyleWriter highlights problems, measures and rates the readability and writing style and offers editing advice and graphs to show you where and how you can improve your draft document. StyleWriter also finds and measures words and sentences that make the reader’s job easier and more enjoyable such as interesting verbs, nouns, names, conversational style, pronouns, direct questions and short sentences. StyleWriter offers you professional advice to improve your writing style.

StyleWriter highlights:

• Words you can change or cut to simplify your style so your reader effortlessly understands your message.
• Long, complex and wordy sentences to help you trim the fat and write in a clear and concise style.
• Passive and hidden verbs which make writing tedious, long-winded and ambiguous.
• Jargon such as abbreviations and acronyms, difficult, unusual and unknown words and abstract phrases that confuse and turn off readers.
• Questionable words such as spelling variants and errors that fool other proofreading tools.

StyleWriter’s measures of a clear writing style

StyleWriter has eight measures of writing style. From a weighted average of these measures, the program works out its Clarity Index.

• • Average Sentence – a key statistic
  • Passive Verbs – an overused style fault
  • Style Index – a measure of plain English style
  • Bog Index – a measure of all style and readability issues
  • Reading Grade – an improved, standard measure of writing.
  • Jargon – a measure of acronyms, jargon phrases and specialist words.
  • Glue – a measure of wordy style.
  • Pep – a measure of reader interest and engagement.
  • Clarity Index – a measure used to award the Clear English Style seal.

StyleWriter can measure the clarity of writing.  Using a database of 500,000 graded words and a comprehensive word, phrase, and pattern style guide, it accurately assesses the readability, clarity and style of your draft and give you a Clarity score.  A perfect score is 100.

To place the award on your document you must score above 7o on the Clarity Index. Our research consistently shows around 60 percent of organizational writing is poorly written and difficult to understand.  Only 10 per cent of the writing we check meets the Clear Writing Standard.

The Business Case for Clear Writing

National governments, councils, multinational corporations, major industry bodies and others have adopted the plain English model for sound, commercial reasons — plain English saves time and money. The savings claimed for plain English are remarkable:
• The US Navy estimated plain English could save it between $250–$300 million every year.
• General Electric saved $275,000 by redrafting manuals into plain English.
• The US Department of Veterans Affairs saved $40,000 redrafting one standard letter into plain English.
• Customers in three surveys of standard letters from banks unanimously preferred the plain English versions.
• British Telecom cut customer queries by 25 percent by using plain English.
• The Royal Mail saved £500,000 in nine months by redesigning one form in plain English.
• UK businesses lose £6 billion a year because of badly written letters.
• A UK Government Plain English initiative saved £9 million in printing costs.

Source: Professor Joe Kimble’s – Writing for Dollars

These savings come from organizations training key staff, employing professional writers and editors. But these people can only edit a few of the thousands of documents produced each day in large organizations. Imagine the savings if you used training and editing software to guarantee all employees wrote clear, plain English in every document.
Many organizations buy 1,000+ user StyleWriter licenses to change the way employees communicate both internally with colleagues and with customers. Our corporate customers include:
• Environmental Protection Agency – 1000-user license
• Farm Credit Administration – Enterprise License
• Federal Aviation Administration – 1000-user license
• Halifax-Bank of Scotland – 1500-user license Read Review
• SNR Denton (legal firm) – 800-user license
• City of Los Angeles – 2400-user license

For these organizations to invest $100,000 to $250,000 in software to improve writing style – the program has to be impressive.

	Case Study: Halifax Bank of Scotland This major financial institution used StyleWriter, a customized house style and the Writing Course to transform the way employees wrote to customers.
	Case Study: Denton Wilde Sapte This progressive firm used StyleWriter to change the way its lawyers wrote, breaking the poor habits typically found in all legal drafting.

Clear, concise and profitable writing

Using StyleWriter will not only help you and your organization improve your writing, but it will also help you to focus on what you are actually writing.

It will train you to reconsider the very reason for your writing and it’s purpose. Which will increase your own efficiencies.

The latest StyleWriter now checks your text for over a million issues.  It’s become the style guide for Microsoft Word users.

Download StyleWriter 4 now for a 14-day free trial

(With no need to add a credit card)

The download contains a Tutor to StyleWriter 4. We recommend you watch the Tutor’s videos to understand the program’s features.

Join the Clear Writing Club Now– to promote your organization and improve your effectiveness.