Evaluating Style Writer 4

So, in my hunt for better editing tools to help speed up the process of refining my writing, I stumbled upon (or perhaps I read it somewhere), a piece of software called Style Writer.

Style Writer is great.  It scores you on all the important parts of your writing, which for anyone who enjoys gamification of life, is quite addictive.

Scoring categories include Bog (how often you mention wet soil in your novel), Passive (whether or not your characters hit other characters), Style (general fashion sense), Jargon (I can't think of anything witty to say about this one) and gives you an overall grade.

All sad puns aside, one of the most useful checking tools it offers is looking for signs of over-writing, which are characterised by bog or glue.  These are words that are used to hold sentences together but which don't offer much in the way of moving things forward.  The more bog and glue you have in your sentence, the longer it takes to make your point... the less attention your reader's going to pay.

For instance, an example of a sentence that needs tidying might be:

She stood still in the cold, dark night, breathing in shallow gasps, wondering how long it would take for the narrator to make a point.

Well, we could just have her standing in the dark.  After all, if your'e standing somewhere, you're generally not prancing about, so my telling you that that she stood still is irrelevant - as is probably the fact that it's cold and that it's dark because it's night.  So you start to see how you can shave words off to make your point.

My natural instinct is to over-write, so I like Style Writer's no-nonsense analysis.  You can't argue with an algorithm.  Well, you can, but you'd better do it succinctly.

Style Writer also looks for passive verbs and overused words such as 'nice' and you can add in new patterns to check for if you know you have particular stylistic tendencies.  For instance, I talk waaaay too much about eyes if I'm not careful.  The trick is to make sure anything you do in your writing is intentional, adds to your voice or the vibe you're trying to create, and doesn't pull readers out of the story to ask themselves 'why the hell do you keep going on about his eyes?'.

It grades your sentence length, checks for sexist comments (yes, seriously) and gives you everything in an easy-to-read pane that highlights whichever elements you want to check for, colour coded to their category.

It's not perfect - as with MS Word's grammar checker, it often highlights words that are correctly used and suggests alternatives.  This refers to the 'confused word' category, where folks might use lie and lay interchangeably or confuse its with it's.  More often than not, I find its suggestions are flat out wrong.  But the developers do ask for feedback and are adding to the software on a regular basis, so I'm hoping this is something that will improve over time.

I'll spend a few more days putting it through its paces, as I haven't used anything like it before, but I think this might be the one for me.  Licences are only $150 USD for one, and another $30 to add additional licences for a laptop or other work station.

At first blush, the only thing I would ask them to add is perhaps some achievements you can unlock (I scored Excellent in BOG!)  so that you can post your success to Facebook, because who doesn't want to do that? - And perhaps to re-skin it so that it looks less 1994 and more Age of Apps.  But many of the writing tools out there do have that ye-olde-world feel and I guess it doesn't affect how it performs.  It's just my preference to have things look shiny.

So, there's my blog post run through Style Writer.  I wonder how Style Writer will score me?  (For the purposes of this experiment, I haven't edited this post to tidy it up).

The Report #stylewriter4