Software That ‘Improves’ Your Writing

meryl.net articles: When Simple Words Work Better has a review of a program that is supposed to help you improve your writing. The following is what got me started.

It’s stuff like this that steers me away from fancy words whether or not I know what they mean. Say what? The title of the paper in question, “Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy.” The article says, “But the four-page send-up, laced with confounding graphs, was accepted by an international conference that itself sounds like a spoof: ‘The Ninth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics.’” (Huh? Run that by me again… again…)

And this is the reason why say those with a PhD are not necessarily the best professors or authors in the world — “The reason something like that can slip by editors without an eye blink is that a lot of people in academia think, speak, and write that way — and they’re hardly alone.”

[Read the rest of the article and review of WhiteSmoke]