Thursday, May 13, 2010

Pages' proofreading

In Episode 5 of the Mac Power Users podcast, Word Processing and Writing, David and Katie point out the proofreading feature in Pages. Like in Word, and in all native Mac programs, misspelled words have red underlines. Word also has a grammar check, the green squiggly underline, which I've grown accustomed to ignoring; it consistently has worse grammar than I do. Today, as I was writing an article, I looked for Pages' green proofreading marks, and it made some suggestions:
  • in terms of: Wordy in certain contexts. Consider simplifying with 'with', 'for', or 'of'.
  • "this same": Redundant expression. Consider deleting 'same'.
  • "for the purpose of": Wordy expression. Simplify by replacing with 'to' and an infinitive verb.
  • relative to: Wordy expression. Consider rephrasing with a more precise preposition.
  • "in general": Stock phrase. Use sparingly.
I pasted my troublesome phrases into Word. It didn't catch any of these. Pages' proofreading is one of the most thoughtful features I've seen in software.

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