PART 4

Edit and Polish

In the previous tutorial we showed you how to use the Library, combine files, and link between and navigate large documents. By now you may already have a few drafts in your Library, so now the real work of editing begins!

Good writing is much like good design. Less is more. As William Strunk of The Elements of Style said:

“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.”

Writer’s Syntax Highlight and Style Check can help you achieve that.

Cut the Clutter

Head to the Focus menu and select Show Syntax which highlights parts of speech in different colors:

• Adjectives are brown
• Nouns are red
• Adverbs are purple
• Verbs are blue
• Conjunctions are green

Here’s an example of how a paragraph looks with Syntax Highlight enabled:

You’ll find that Syntax Highlight is good at highlighting patterns in your writing. Too many adverbs? Repetitive nouns? Overused conjunctions? Weak verbs? Now you’ll spot them right away. You decide if you want to keep words or delete them.

💡 Syntax Highlight works great with Focus Mode because it helps you see your text’s structure down to the sentence level.

Learn more about Syntax Highlight here.

Refine Your Style

Go to the Focus menu again, select Enable Style Check, then choose which types of style issues you want Writer to flag for you, including:

• Fillers (basically, pretty much, sort of)
• Redundancies (basic fundamentals, combine together, fall down)
• Clichés (against all odds, brass tacks, long and short of it)

Style Check applies strikethrough to any style issues it finds, which you’ll only see in the Editor. Style Check strikethrough is not visible in Preview, or your exported document.

Unlike your high-school language teacher, Style Check doesn’t tell you what’s right. Instead, it encourages you to rethink your choice of words. You decide what to keep, rewrite, or delete.

💡 Style Check only runs on your device—Writer doesn’t send your text to any servers or cloud. It doesn’t use AI either. That means your text is always private until you choose to share it.

Here’s a more detailed guide on how to use Style Check. You can also learn more about the philosophy behind Style Check in our release article: The Power of Style Check.

You now understand how Style Check and Syntax Highlight can help polish your writing. In the next tutorial, you’ll learn how to track text from different authors—and use AI to improve your writing, not replace it.