Computer aids for writers

Abstract

For many people, writing is painful and editing one's own prose is difficult, tedious, and error-prone. It is often hard to see which parts of a document are difficult to read or how to transform a wordy sentence into a more concise one. It is even harder to discover that one overuses a particular linguistic construct. The system of programs described here helps writers to evaluate documents and to produce better written and more readable prose. The system consists of programs to measure surface features of text that are important to good writing style as well as programs to do some of the tedious jobs of a copy editor. Some of the surface features measured are readability, sentence and word length, sentence type, word usage, and sentence openers. The copy editing programs find spelling errors, wordy phrases, bad diction, some punctuation errors, double words, and split infinitives.