About Editor

The Program

The Editor software for checking spelling, usage, punctuation, and style is compact and fast.   Its professional critiques of usage and style help writers edit and polish their work.  It checks for many spelling mistakes that other checkers miss and for myriads of common stylistic flaws that other checkers ignore.  It is useful to students from junior high school through college and to professional writers in any field.  Editor runs on Windows 98SE, 2000, XP, and Vista, requiring less than 3 MB of memory and disk storage.  It reads documents composed on major word processors and in RTF and HTML.  

Editor's extensive writing-reference screens, available at a mouse click or keystroke while reviewing the program’s analysis, provide des-
criptions and illustrations of each writing problem Editor finds.   The onscreen Writer’s Manual contains helpful discussions of writing as well as information about using the program to improve a writer’s work.

Its History

For over twenty-five years, students and professional writers have been using Editor to polish their prose.  Teachers in high schools, colleges, and universities have featured the software in classrooms, writing labs, and homework assignments, both as an educational tool and as a way to reduce the burden of marking up papers by having students take on more of the work.

Developed for student use and classroom teaching beginning in 1982, Editor was the only academic software selected by the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) as part of their software-
publication initiative, Software for Students and Scholars.  MLA published Editor in 1990 in an MS-DOS edition, with an upgrade in 1995 and a revised version for the Macintosh in 2001.

The current Windows® edition of Editor, published and distributed by Serenity Software, is a comprehensive revision and upgrade of those earlier editions, with enhanced style-analysis and text-checking capabilities helpful to advanced writers.

Its Authors

The designers and programmers of Editor and this Web site are Elaine and John Thiesmeyer, professors of English and teachers of writing for many years at Rochester Institute of Technology and Hobart and William Smith Colleges, respectively.  In addition to their training in English language and literature at Cornell, Elaine studied computer science at RIT and John studied and taught linguistics.  The Thiesmeyers have published a number of essays and given many presentations at academic conferences on computers and writing.

Last revised January 27 2008