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Syntax Highlight Windows

Syntax Control on Windows offers an organized perspective of your document and can help refine your writing style.

This feature applies diverse colors to various parts of speech to make them stand out:

You can then easily identify instances of repetition or awkward phrasing.

Syntax Control does not modify your content in any way, and the highlighted parts of speech will not be visible in Preview, exported or printed documents. This feature is visible in the Editor only.

Enable Syntax Control

You can enable Syntax Control from the Focus menu:

Parts of Speech

You can specify which parts of speech are highlighted by selecting/deselecting options (a check mark will appear).

In the example below, only nouns and verbs have been enabled. This will help you spot weak verbs or repetitions.

Languages

iA Writer for Windows supports Syntax Control for English.

If your document contains non-English text, you may see the following warning dialog box at the bottom of the Editor:

The language of the current file does not seem to be supported by Syntax Control.

Working With Syntax Control

There is no right or wrong way to work with this feature, but from the user’s feedback, it seems that enabling Syntax Control during the editing phase is the most common. Of course, you can keep it ON at any time in your writing process.

Syntax Control pairs effectively with Focus Mode, helping you grasp the structure down to the sentence level:

A similar feature that can be activated concurrently is Style Check, pointing out fillers, clichés, and redundancies.

For further tips on how to write, you can check those various blog posts from our website: Writing Tips.

Contact Us

If you are experiencing a problem that our support section doesn’t solve please reach out to us. We take a break on the weekends (JST), but during weekdays we aim to reply within 1-2 business days.

Syntax Highlight

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