Editor: a Copyediting and Proofreading Program

Editor is different.   It does not make empty promises or inflated claims about what it can accomplish, and its prices are reasonable.   It is not a spelling checker, though it finds thousands of spelling mistakes that word processors' spelling checkers overlook.  Editor does not find or correct syntax errors—no software can do that reliably—and does not work from inside any word processor.  But the Editor program is a remedy for important weaknesses of spelling and grammar checkers.  It is unmatched in its thorough analysis of prose style and is an indispensable tool for writers, writing teachers, and editors.

Contemporary English prose needs editing.  It 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, alas, do many human editors.  Editor begins where these others leave off.

First published in 1990, Editor is used by students, teachers, business people, and professional writers throughout the US and in 50 other countries around the world.  It is a Windows® program but, using CodeWeavers' Crossover software, also runs on Macintoshes and in Linux.

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 150,000
common spelling errors, mechanical errors, usage mistakes, and stylistic misdemeanors that elude other text checkers.

Editor’s design models and encourages the editing-and-
revision procedure used by good writers, whose essential work of rewriting takes place between a first draft and a final presentation.

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 figure out.  If you recognize most of them, you may not need Editor's help.  (The pop-ups are illustrations and do not reproduce the pro-
gram's actual comments.  Click here for examples of Editor's displays.)

Read some of our customers' comments.  Many questions that prospective customers have about Editor are answered in detail on our FAQ page.

Last revised Aug 8 2009