Writing Help for the Turgid

The better we write, the more successful we and our organizations are likely to be.

Corporate Voice, $120, from Scandinavian PC Systems, Rockville, Md., (800) 288-SCAN, is software designed to help individuals and companies produce better writing. It runs on IBM and compatible personal computers.

The program works by comparing newly written material against several built-in models of writing style or to custom styles that you add.

It should not be confused with a grammar checker, such as Grammatik. Corporate Voice doesn’t pay any attention to grammar or spelling. (But it may not work properly if words are misspelled, so you should run documents through the spelling check in your word-processing software before using Corporate Voice.)

Writers may rebel at the thought, but program designer Roland Larson has reduced the concept of writing style to pure mathematical formulas, building on the old and accepted equations of Rudolph Flesch and J. Peter Kincaid. Those gentlemen were responsible for the Flesch reading ease index and Flesch-Kincaid index, respectively, which are used by some federal and state government agencies to grade the comprehensibility of their documents.

This column, for instance, rates a 60.4 on the Flesch reading ease index and 8.7 on the Flesch-Kincaid index. Both ratings indicate that this column is difficult to read. But that information alone is not very beneficial in telling me how to improve.

Corporate Voice makes more useful judgments about this article, however:

“Text’s focal point is very favorably located.”

“Text has a broad spread on the Style diagram. Very good!”

“You can improve your text’s readability if you: Write even more sentences containing only short words; reduce the number of ‘complicated’ sentences; try to use more simple, ordinary words.”

Good writing often does favor short sentences and simple words. That is what “The Elements of Style,” the classic book on the subject by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, has been preaching for decades.

Corporate Voice will not teach you which words are best nor how to distinguish strong sentences from weak ones. But it will show you the relative complexity and ease of reading of your writing compared to that of others.

The heart of Corporate Voice is a graphic depiction of a document’s complexity. The instruction manual calls it a “teardrop diagram.” But I couldn’t discern a teardrop shape until I read the thorough (and quite mathematical) appendix that explains the computational underpinnings of the program.

What you see is basically a scatter diagram in which the number of words in sentences is plotted against what the program calls excess syllables. All syllables in excess of one per word are considered excess for charting purposes. Short sentences with short words are depicted as points at the lower left of the screen. As sentence length goes up, the marks move to the right, and as words get longer, they move toward the top of the chart.

Every sentence is plotted on the chart with a dot. The sentence you just read has 10 words, three of which are two syllables long. So its dot will show up at the intersection of 10 across on the horizontal length scale and three up on the vertical excess syllable scale.

You actually see the stairstep outlines of the style envelope on your screen. That ragged box of sorts shows the outer limits of sentence length and multisyllabic complexity for the style model you have chosen. What the developers call a focal point is the cumulative average of sentence length and excess syllables, depicted by an asterisk on the chart. It should be near the center of the style envelope.

You can instantly see if any of your sentences are out of bounds. If you have a color monitor, those outside the style box are marked in purple or red, depending on how “bad” they are.

Such sentences are called “deviant sentences” by the program. It will display them for you at the bottom of the screen, one at a time.

To get you started, Corporate Voice comes with a selection of styles to model your writing after, from Louis L’Amour to Ian Fleming to computer writer John C. Dvorak’s “PC Crash Course and Survival Guide” (which Scandinavian PC Systems publishes) to a government report.

Not surprisingly, this article scored between 94% and 99% compatible with style models derived from Dvorak’s book, general purpose articles, magazine articles, technical writing and news stories. It had too many complex words and sentences for good matches with Ian Fleming, his successor John Gardner and Louis L’Amour. The scores were 85%, 78% and 75%.

The strength of the program, however, lies in the ability to create your own style models to follow. I easily created one by having it read a collection of my previous columns. If I should get too wordy or technical in a future article, Corporate Voice will quickly show me where I have gone astray.

The program designers suggest that organizations create style models from the works of their best writers. They suggest using a group of documents totaling at least 20,000 words (about 50 single-spaced pages) but say twice that is even better. Style models have been built from upwards of 500 pages.

The only caution is really common sense. Make sure that all the documents are comparable when you make a style. Don’t mix your sales letters to clients with the text of the annual report or the pleadings in a patent suit. Instead, make separate style models out of each of those categories if you like.

If you are not particularly proud of any of your own writings and covet those of a competitor, use the competitor’s works as a model.

Popular word-processing files can be analyzed by Corporate Voice, plus unformatted text files, which virtually any editing software can produce.

Once a document is measured against a model, you can look at it 16 different ways. One of the more interesting is a set of three cadence charts that shows the patterns of sentence type, sentence length and word length. For easy and interesting reading, you want to have a lot of variability in those charts. Regular patterns will lull readers to sleep.

Will such a program make anyone a better writer?

Just rereading what you have written before it is submitted goes a long way toward improvement, and Corporate Voice helps you do that by flagging problem sentences and highlighting words that could be simplified.

But if you are serious enough to buy software to help you write, you ought also to buy--and read--the Strunk and White classic.

CORPORATE VOICE

A $120 program to improve writing.

Features: You can create models from the works of your best writers or the best writing of your competitors. Measure your writing against the models and see where improvements are needed.

Requirements: IBM PC or compatible with 256 kilobytes of memory and either floppy or hard disk storage. Works with any monitor.

Publisher: Scandinavian PC Systems, 51 Monroe St., Suite 1101, Rockville, Md. 20850. Phone: (800) 288-SCAN.