After its launch on Mac and iOS last summer and its recent introduction to Windows, Style Check has arrived on Android with version 2.1 of iA Writer. It has been one of our best received and most requested features, therefore we worked hard to make it available for all platforms.
Why do you need Style Check? As William Strunk Jr. put it in The Elements of Style,
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
Style Check helps you refine your work with suggestions optimized on large bodies of text. It doesn’t tell you what is right, but it makes you think about what you say. It grays out superfluous words and strikes them through hypothetically, so you can see how your text will flow with them removed.
In version 2.1, you find Style Check in the menu, where you can now toggle not only Dark Mode, Focus Mode and Word Count, but Style Check, too. When you first turn on Style Check, it will mark all filler words, redundancies and clichés in your text. You can choose to show or hide any of these categories in the Settings. There, you can also set the language of Style Check to English, German or French.
What’s more, you can add your own custom patterns, i.e. turns of phrase you wish to mark and avoid. Don’t forget, you decide which Style Check suggestions to accept or discard. They are simply suggestions. The feature is not designed to cut your words, it is honed to help you consider them closely, until your text flows just right.
Would you like to know more about the methodology behind Style Check? Read our introductory post about the feature to know more.
Try Style Check now: if you are using iA Writer version 2.0.1, you can upgrade to 2.1 for free in Google Play. If you have an earlier version, but you’d still like to try Style Check without commitment, there is a 30-day in-app free trial in Google Play. Purchasing the new app is also worthwhile, since 2.1 includes more productive features, such as collaboration and Style Check, and all future updates will be free, too.
Thanks to everyone who downloaded or plans to download iA Writer: an app is nothing without its users. We love to get feedback from you, so we can keep optimizing iA Writer for its actual, real-life use cases. Don’t hesitate to drop us a message about your experience with the app or even about the dream feature you think the app is missing. If you want to immerse yourself even more into improving iA Writer, you can sign up to the ranks of our beta tester team by sending us an email.