Why Writers Should Check Documents with the Editor Software

Editor addresses the notable shortcomings of reference works and of popular copyediting and text-checking software.

Grammar handbooks, style guides, editing manuals, dictionaries of spelling and usage, and similar reference works contain a vast body of information and instruction on writing well.  For inexperienced writers, however, these resources have a nearly fatal flaw: they can help improve a writer's work only if the writer already knows what to look up.  Inexperienced writers usually cannot identify problems in punctuation, spelling, word choice, phrasing, and style simply by looking over their work.  Many writers lack the specialized vocabulary needed to consult reference works' indexes or tables of contents effectively.   Even professional writers fail to recognize some of the clutter in their work, as the pages of newspapers, magazines, and books amply demonstrate.

Spelling checkers are a blessing to poor spellers but they often fail to catch common spelling errors.   Pervasive mistakes like misspelled homonyms and homophones, mixed-up possessives and plurals, broken compounds, and missing hyphens elude spelling checkers because the individual words are not misspelled.   Grammar checkers identify some syntax problems but, as many users have discovered, in too many cases the identifications and suggested repairs are wrong—
even wildly wrong.  Perhaps more important, grammar checkers ignore many of the nonsyntactic writing faults and blemishes that occur in poor writing.  For examples, see the sidebars of these pages.

Editor can find more than 100,000 common writing mistakes and problems, in half a hundred categories of spelling, usage, punc-
tuation, and style, that other text checkers fail to recognize.  Editor is conservative and demanding, taking good-quality formal prose as its standard, but writers, editors, and teachers can modify many of the editing rules to suit other styles.

See examples of our customers' comments.

Last revised Aug 1 2008