Style Check

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

You are the only one seeing words being crossed out in the Editor, as the strikethrough mark won’t appear in the Preview or when you export/ print your document. It is up to you to delete them, following Style Check suggestions, or keep them to fit more your style.

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.

How to 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 shortcut ⌥⇧⌘D
– 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/

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