PerfectIt! editing software
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Against our better judgement, Red Pony recently trialled a piece of editing software that, on the face of it, would seem to be our natural enemy.
PerfectIt! from Intelligent Editing claims to locate typos and grammatical errors in Microsoft Word documents – which is what the spell checker does already, I hear you say. Yes, this is true, but it also claims to detect other errors that ‘no spelling or grammar check will discover’.
What they are talking about is consistency, which can be one of the biggest headache-sources for editors. It turns out that PerfectIt! is actually a pretty useful tool for any document over about 20 pages long. It will search out inconsistent word hyphenations and capitalisations, variant abbreviation definitions, inconsistent heading capitalisation, and bullet capitalisation and punctuation.
While we use style sheets to keep our usage consistent and accurate when working with larger documents, it helps a great deal to be able to press a button at the end of the editing process just to check that no inconsistencies have slipped through the net.
PerfectIt! can’t help you rewrite a confused sentence, but it certainly can save you from the embarrassment of finding the same expression rendered three different ways through your document.
