Wednesday, October 8, 2008

White Smoke Review

The White Smoke software is available as a download and works with any program. You can paste text in and copy it out, or simply compose in the compose window. I tried the online demo, and there are some minor differences from the downloadable product. However, most of the main features are the same.

So, what does it look like? It’s a bit like Word, Google Docs and other word processing programs. It’s got a simple array of formatting buttons across the top for editing style, font and font size, followed by buttons for bold, italics, underline, creating coloured text and a few more. The second row has buttons for alignment, bullets and numbering, and cutting and pasting. A cool feature is that it will paste text from Word or plain text depending on the button you choose.

The top of the window has three tabs on the left (enrichment, dictionary and templates) plus two on the right for information. The templates window allows you to load one of 600 templates in the commercial, literary, medical or legal categories and customise them for your needs. The dictionary is a lookup window and the main window, where you write and edit text, is enrichment. At the bottom of a window is a WhiteSmoke button, as well as undo, redo and demo buttons. The bottom right allows you to select the type of writing you are doing (great for those interested in business and literary, less so for those of us who blog for a living) If you’re writing a speech, dissertation or letter, you’re covered too. On to the main window.

Grammar Checking

You can use WhiteSmoke with any application, since it works with cut and paste, and you can also set it to check as you type. When you paste some text in, and hit one of those two buttons you get some text underlined in different colours. The colour code is blue for enrichment/thesaurus, green for grammar and red for spelling, cleverly following MS Word conventions. Here is where it gets interesting. Click on or hover over an underlined word and you get suggestions for improvement. So, how did WhiteSmoke do? I used it to check three articles I was writing for a client.

It picked up well on spelling errors. I use UK English, so it tried to convert them to US English. It found no grammatical errors - I had to insert a deliberate mistake to test that. That’s a major improvement over Word, which always finds grammatical errors where there are none. For me, the winner was the enrichments popup menu. That’s in two parts. The left suggests adjectives and adverbs you can add to enrich your writing, while the right suggests synonyms. Just click to add your changes. I liked some of the suggestions and can see where this type of software would help people who struggle with writing.

There are several different WhiteSmoke products aimed respectively at general writing, business writing, creative writing, legal writing, medical writing and executive writing, as well as a language translator that offers instant translation into 20 languages. There are also pro versions with additional enhancements (currently on sale for $1 when you buy the main program).

White Smoke is a useful product, especially for people who are new to writing or who have English as a second language. Even experienced writers will find it useful on a day when the words just aren’t flowing the way you want.

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Wednesday, October 1, 2008

white smoke grammar software review

New WhiteSmoke 2009 White Smoke is a program that aims to help its users produce better-written documents. It does this by analyzing the spelling, punctuation and grammar in any document, and then suggesting corrections and possible improvements. White Smoke is compatible with Microsoft Windows ME, Windows2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista. It will work in almost any text-based application, including word processors, email programs, web-based forms, and so on.

Once White Smoke is installed on your PC, you use it as follows. First, you create your text in your chosen application (e.g. Microsoft Word). Select the text you want to analyze by highlighting it in the normal way, then press the White Smoke shortcut key. This is set by default to F2, though you can change it if you like. In Word a separate “Enrichment” button is created on the toolbar, and you can click on this as an alternative to pressing the shortcut key.

White Smoke will then open in a new window, with your selected text in a box in the middle. Spelling mistakes are highlighted in red and grammar mistakes in green. When you move the cursor over any item, suggested corrections (a range of them) appear in a box at the foot of the screen. You can accept or reject any correction just by clicking on it.

Perhaps the most interesting feature for writers, however, is the enrichment function. The White Smoke software analyzes your writing and looks for ways it could be improved, e.g. by using an alternate word or phrase (thesaurus function), or by adding extra words. All candidates for enrichment are highlighted in blue in the White Smoke window, and suggested additions and alternatives are shown in the boxes below. Again, you are at liberty to accept or reject any change. Once you have gone through all the program’s suggestions, just save the changes and close WhiteSmoke, and the corrected and “enriched” version will automatically appear in the original application.

Overall, I was impressed with how easy White Smoke was to use, and its effectiveness. Obviously Word does have its own spelling and grammar checkers, but WhiteSmoke’s appear to work better. This is especially so with the grammar checker, which is far more user-friendly than Word’s. The “Enrichment” function is particularly good for revealing ways in which text can be improved. Obviously not all the changes the software suggests will be appropriate, but simply seeing the suggested alternatives can jolt you out of using the same old words and expressions, and give your writing a new, fresher feel.

The version of White Smoke I evaluated was the standard one, which is really aimed at business users. It would still be useful for writers, but White Smoke also offer a version of the software specially tailored for use by creative writers. If you’re a novelist or short story writer, this would probably be the version to go for. It has a larger vocabulary than the standard version, and is less likely to suggest inserting business-related terms such as inventory and turnover into your sensitive description of a woodland sunset…

Are there any drawbacks to White Smoke? Well, a possible one for some users is that you need to have an Internet connection open while you are using it. White Smoke say this is because the program’s database is constantly updated via the web. For most users this is unlikely to present problems, but if you regularly use your computer off-line, it might be a bit frustrating.

White Smoke is probably ideally suited for writers who are buzzing with ideas but know that they have a few shortcomings in grammar, punctuation, and so on. Even if you’re reasonably confident in these areas, however, White Smoke can give you a fresh perspective, and suggestions for improving passages of text you may have become “bogged down” on.

For more information about White Smoke, click on any of the links in this article to visit their sales site. Watch out for their regular special offers!


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