Editor: a Copyediting and Proofreading Program

"A lifesaving program to show you how much you've forgotten
about good writing."   — Pat W. Kirk, author and publisher

Contemporary English prose is littered with wordy phrases, needless repetitions, clichés, trite expressions, vague terms, redundancy, pretentious language, illogical statements, homonym confusions, jargon, misspelled terms, incorrectly formed plurals and possessives, and other common problems.  Proofreading tools featured in word processors miss most stylistic clutter and many outright blunders in spelling, usage, and mechanics--and so do many human editors.

Grammar handbooks, style guides, editing manuals, dictionaries of spelling and usage, and similar reference works contain a vast body of information and instruction on how to attend to these problems.  For inexperienced writers, these resources have a nearly fatal flaw: they can help improve a writer's work only if the writer 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.

As a complement to word processors' spelling and grammar checkers, a remedy for some of their weaknesses, and a replacement for much inaccessible information in reference works, Editor begins where these other writing aids leave off.  Unmatched in its thorough analysis of prose style, it is an indispensable tool for writers, writing teachers, and editors.  First published in 1990, Editor is used by students, teachers, business people, and professional writers throughout the US and Canada and in 62 other countries around the world.

Editor cannot teach you to write, but it can help you write better.  Like a professional copyeditor, Editor proofreads and helps correct and polish writers’ drafts at the word and phrase levels.  The software can identify more than 200,000
common spelling errors, mechanical errors, usage mistakes, and stylistic misdemeanors that elude other text checkers.

Many questions that prospective customers have about Editor are answered on our FAQ page.  Our customers' comments will answer other questions.

The sidebars of these pages give examples of writing problems that popular spelling and grammar checkers miss but Editor identifies.
Before sliding your cursor over them, see how many problems you
can identify.  If you recognize most of them, you may not need Editor's help.  (The pop-ups are illustrations and do not reproduce the program's actual comments.  Click to see examples of Editor's displays for the Standard Version and the Editor for Word Version.)

Last revised 22 Feb 2012