Spelling & Other Tools Contents: -----Dictionary -----Grammar & Style Analyzers -----Spelling Checkers -----Thesaurus =============== -----Dictionary [JORJ_A, JORJ_O] JORJ (Jorj Software Co.; $30) is a 58,000-word dictionary on a disk. It is a quick and easy way to check the spelling or meaning of a word. You can enter a word the way it sounds and JORJ will locate the actual spelling. Also included are Postal state abbreviations, weights and measures, and foreign words and phrases. A version is included that uses EMS/XMS. [SPELRITE] SpellRite (JMA Software; $32) is a spelling assistance program. It brings up a large list of words that you can easily scroll or search through. A 31K TSR version and a non-resident version of the program are provided. -----Grammar & Style Analyzers [CLFINDER] Cliche Finder 1.7 (R. K. West Consulting ASP; $0) is a writer's tool that helps avoid the use of trite and overused words and phrases. It checks a document for the presence of any of several hundred cliches. This program has the option to create text file with cliches marked. Progress is displayed on screen as a document is checked. The user can interrupt the procedure. It comes with a utility program that allows you to edit the cliche list. Requires 360K RAM. [CRITIC] Critic 2.3 (Wygant, James; $10) is a writing analysis program. It creates a copy of your text file with comments embedded, pointing out long sentences, words that are repeated too close together (eg: "I really think you really ought to..."), words that are generally overused, split infinitives, and many other grammar errors. At the end of the file is placed a word-frequency chart, a word-length chart, a count of words in the file, and a sentence length chart. Another chart compares your writing to that of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Stephen King, Byte, and Time magazines. Also included is a Readability chart with tips for improvement. There is even a punctuation analysis. Overall, we think this is the best shareware writing analyzer we have seen and that it is modestly priced at its $10 shareware registration fee. [FOGFINDR] FogFin (Robichaux, Joey; $15) is a program based on the Gunning Fog Index. A Fog Index is a measure of what people consider easy reading. It doesn't measure whether the writing is good, bad, clear, or muddy. However, it will measure whether the writing will tire the reader because of the way the words and sentences are assembled. [GRAMMAR] Grammar Online! 1.01 (Roberts & Richards, Inc.; $15) is a 116k TSR grammar aid which can be used with most word processing programs as a pop-up menu. It will provide assistance on the proper use of commas, punctuation, sentence structure, etc. [PHRASEWA] Phrase Watcher 2.4 (Yee, George; $8) finds all sentences in a document containing bad or wordy phrases and suggests possible improvements. [PROSCRIB] Professional Scribe (Smetana, Rob W.; $43) analyzes your writing style. Maxi-Read thinks the sentences in our newsletters are too long and that many of the words are too long. Here are some of the words it thought were too long: library, consider, example, newsletter, imagine, anymore, everyone, already, directory... excuse me, am I going too fast for the dullards in the audience? ...f-o-r-m-a-t, s-p-e-c-i-f-y... well, you get the idea. PS checks your writing for five categories of writing mistakes: wasted words, misused words, tongue waggers, nouns-to-verbs and passive voice. You can customize PS to eliminate your own pet pieces of jargon you want to avoid. Support for WP 5.0 and MS Word files is provided and an on-line thesaurus and a second program to help you customize your thesaurus are also included. A line-by-line analysis of what's on the screen, and a running grade level analysis give you even more feedback on your writing. [READ_GS] Read21 (Spiegel, Glenn; $?) a program to calculate (for your writings) Flesch readability scores which are purportedly more reliable than the "Fog Index". READ will read WordPerfect and WordStar files without converting. [READABIL] Readability Plus (Scandinavian PC Systems; $25) analyzes your writing on the basis of a sophisticated language analysis system that identifies sentences that aren't appropriate for particular kinds of writing. It assumes that what you've written is mechanically correct. Rather than look for errors, it looks for sentences and words that aren't appropriate for your intended audience and purpose. Compare your text to any of the nine writing style models provided with the program. The program directly reads documents created with WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, WordStar, and WordStar 2000. It can also read any ASCII text file. It generates four readability indices: the Flesch-Kincaid Index, the Flesch Reading Ease Index, Gunning's Fog Index, and LIX (the technical name for RIX). [READRITE] ReadRite 1.41 (Petrakis, Peter L., Ph.D., M.P.H.;; $0) is a memory-resident program that determines the Flesch readability score of text that is on your monitor screen, either the whole screen or a marked block. While we have other programs for checking completed files, this one lets you check your work as you go. It also counts the words on the screen. res:7k [STYLED] Styled (Crew, Louie; $?) is a writing analysis program. It reports on "long words" (over 10 characters), punctuation, syntax and "nominalization". If you don't know what the latter is, you probably don't want to know. The program is not judgmental. It reports its analysis and leaves it up to you how to use the information. [WORDFRE] WordFreq charts the usage of different length words in a text file. [WSTYLE] WStyle 1.13 (Wintertree Software Inc.; $29) examines your writing for redundant words, wordy phrases, and inappropriate sentence structure; analyzes your writing style and provides statistics that specify where your writing is poor and where it is strong. WStyle is able to check files created by most word processing software. -----Spelling Checkers [CCHECK] Cross Check (Cross Computing Incorporated; $10) is a fast spelling checker with a well-designed interactive mode in which you can page/scroll up and down the list of misspelled words. Options allow you to view words in context, replace words in the file, and add words to the dictionary. The non-interactive mode sends a list of misspelled words to a text file. Utilities let you convert the dictionary file to a plain text file for easy modification and convert text files back to the dictionary file format. Another utility makes it easy to delete files from the dictionary without doing a conversion, and of course words can be added in the interactive mode. CC allows a general dictionary plus additional specialized dictionaries. This allows you to minimize the number of words that CC has to check against when you are dealing with special types of documents. Although the general dictionary that comes on the disk only has 16,000, we do not consider this a serious limitation because it is easy to add lists of words. This is an excellent program and at $10 to register, appears to be an absolute steal. [DO_SPELL] DO-Spell 3.71d (Kleijn, Han; $0) is an English and Dutch spelling checker. It comes with a 60,000-word list in English, a 54,744-word list in Dutch, and a 3000-word list in German (this comes to us from The Netherlands). As a 116k TSR, it can easily be used in conjunction with any editor or word processor. It works simply by reading the screen and highlighting words not in it the selected word list, which it does very quickly. [JSPELL] jspell 2.0 (Jeong, Joohee; $31) is a spelling checker. Features include fast and intelligent suggestions for misspelled words, dictionary manager, undo up to 400 steps, multiple user dictionaries, file specific dictionary, network support, foreign character support, and more. [LEGALDIC] Legal Dictionary ($0) is a list of words peculiar to the legal profession. This is NOT a program. It is simply a list of words in straight ASCII text for importing into a spelling checker such as Cross Check. [PCPROOF] PC-Proof 2.0a (Intellect Systems ASP; $40) is a grammar checker which can detect dropped words, extra words, words which have been misspelled into another word and other common errors such as subject/verb agreement and missing punctuation. The program highlights the sentence that contains the suspected error and displays a detailed explanation and some advice. It allows you to write the incorrect sentence and an explanation of the error to a problem report file, edit the incorrect sentence, add a comment about the error, or ignore the problem from now on. You also have the option to proofread the entire document without stopping and all sentences with suspected errors will be written to the problem report file. This option allows you to do something else while your document is being proofread. PC-Proof can read files created by WordPerfect, Microsoft Word for DOS, Microsoft Word for Windows, Microsoft Works, Professional Write and other formats which are mostly ASCII text. Requires 850K of disk space. [SHRSPELL] Sharespell (Acropolis Software; $20) is a stand-alone spelling checker with a 112,000+ word dictionary to which you can add more words. It displays the text of the file it is checking as it checks it so that you can see the context at all times. It displays a list of possible corrections when it finds a word not in its dictionary. The program can handle words longer than 20 characters. Interestingly, it will display multiple words where appropriate. For example, when we tested it on a Reviews file, it came across the program name GRADESCAN, one of its alternative choices was GRADE SCAN -- two legitimate words when not run together. Unlike CROSS CHECK, ShareSpell does not support a second specialized dictionary file nor does it allow importing word lists, but its dictionary is several times larger than Cross Check's. [SPELCHEK] SpelChek (Floyd, Edwin; $0) is a high speed, batch-oriented spelling checker. It writes any words not found in the dictionary to an output file. TP6 and TASM source code is included. [SPELLR] SpellR 2.0 (JeWeL Software; $30) will check the spelling of any straight text document. It will then create a file with all of the words not found in its 40,000-word dictionary. The use can also specify an additional file of words to check the text file against. The output file format is well suited to being processed by the BRIEF editor, but BRIEF is not required. -----Thesaurus [MW120] MultiWord (Digital Crypto & Peter Moreton; $24-$95) is a thesaurus that can operate as a stand-alone or as a 28k TSR, pop-up program. MultiWord has over 9000 main entries with over 60,000 synonyms. When you select a word it will automatically feed it back to the program you are using. [POPSAUR] PopSaurus (Acropolis Software; $18) is a pop-up thesaurus. It can operate as a 10K TSR or stand-alone program. It has 8,282 entry points into 70,793 words. [THESPLS] Thesaur Plus (Burgess, Derrick ASP; $20) is a memory resident thesaurus. By using EMS or disk swapping, it uses only 24k of DOS RAM. It contains over 50,000 words, plus the ability to add and delete any synonym. A non-tsr version is included.