Style Check iPhone

Style Check for iOS is like having a personal editor-in-chief on your device, carefully reviewing your text for redundancies, clichés, and filler words as you type.

Important points about this feature:

• only you see words being crossed out (the strikethrough mark won’t appear in Preview or Export)
• no deletions occur unless you choose to do them
• your text stay private and on your device (not sent to an internet service for review)
• there is no AI and it doesn’t steal your texts

Style Check is currently available for English, French, and German. It will cross out:

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

For more details about Style Check, you can read this introduction blogpost: The Power of Style Check.

Enable Style Check

You can enable/ disable Style Check from:

• the settings Library → ⚙️ /Settings → Editor → Style Check
• the lightning menu (configure the menu by adding Style Check as an action)
• the Navigation Bar AA → Enable/ Disable Style Check

You can fully enable Style Check (including fillers, redundancies, clichés, and custom patterns) or just some of them:

We spent a lot of time developing this feature and we are still improving it regularly. However, our users might feel the need to customize Style Check regarding their own writing style. This is where Custom Patterns shines.

Custom Patterns

Custom patterns allow you to create exceptions or new rules to Style Check, to better fit your style. To create a custom pattern, go to Library → ⚙️ /Settings → Editor → Style Check → Custom Patterns

Below is an example of when adding an exception allowing the filler “as well as”:

Custom Patterns Syntax

For your information, here is the syntax for customizing Style Check with Custom Patterns. You won’t need to remember it as you can find all of these in the Help Section of iA Writer.

Add a Rule

filler
custom ~~filler~~

Provide an Exception

Exceptions affect both custom and built-in patterns.

-filler
-custom ~~filler~~ exception

Regular Expressions

You can use regular expressions by enclosing a pattern in slashes:

/custom ~~filler~~ reg(exp?|ular expression)/
-/reg(exp?|ular expression) exception/

Feature	Notes
Character classes [a–c0-9]	Supported, limited to ASCII
Repeated character classes [a-z]+	Does not repeat if the character class contains more than 10 characters
Negated [^a]	Ignored
Optional a?	Supported
Escaped \.	Supported
a* b+ c{2,} d{3,15}	Limited to 10 repetitions
Lazy matches	Undefined behavior
Greedy matches	Undefined behavior
Alternation |	Supported
Octal characters \0ooo	Supported
Any character .	Ignored
Word character \w	Undefined behavior
Non-word character \W	Undefined behavior
Anchors ^ $ \b \B \A \Z \z \G	Supported
Capturing parentheses (…)	Supported
Backreferences \1	Supported
Named capture groups (?<name>…)	Supported
Named backreferences \k<name>	Supported
Non-capturing parentheses (?:…)	Supported
Comments (?#…)	Supported
Lookahead (?=…)	Ignored
Negative lookahead (?!…)	Ignored
Lookbehind (?<=…)	Ignored
Negative lookbehind (?<!…)	Ignored
Atomic match (?>…)	Non-capturing parentheses
Expression modifiers (?id-id:…)	Ignored
Mode modifiers (?id-id)	Ignored
Modifiers /…/id-id	Supported

Modifiers	Notes
Case insensitive matching i	On by default
Diacritic insensitive matching d	Off by default

Note that only a subset of regular expression features is supported to avoid slowing down editing.

Style Check