StyleWriter will help you keep difficult words to a minimum to improve your writing style!

Clear writing means using words familiar to the reader. If you write with words outside the vocabulary of your readers—either to impress or expecting them to look words up in a dictionary—there's little hope of you writing clearly. Some words are highly specialist, others are simply beyond the understanding of typical readers.

Here are some examples:

• anabantid
• bathypelagic
• criosphinxes
• deleing
• ecumenicity
• furunculous

The more of these words you use, the more difficult your style becomes. It's always worth reviewing such words and trying to keep them to a minimum. If you have to use one, then you should consider explaining its meaning to your audience.

Example: When life-sustaining treatment is discontinued, society shows its respect for the anencephalic neonate by treating the neonate as it would any other terminally ill patient whose life-sustaining treatment is being discontinued.

Tip: StyleWriter's word-list contains around 200,000 entries. If its spellchecker highlights a word that's not a proper noun, you might have used the correct spelling—but it might be unknown by the reader. As most readers have a reading vocabulary of around 35,000 words, treat such words with suspicion and try to edit them from your writing.

Switching Difficult Words on or off

You can switch StyleWriter's Difficult Words category on or off. If you work in a highly specialist discipline such as cancer research, you may decide to switch this category of jargon off permanently because it highlights too many words that you use. If you do so, StyleWriter will still assess the words as part of your Bog Score and highlight them in Jargon Phrases and High Bog sentences.

Tip: Rather than switch the Difficult Words category off, we recommend you make an exception in StyleWriter for the difficult words essential to your specialist area. StyleWriter has thousands of specialist words in its database and you probably only have fewer than 50 in your area of expertise. By adding exceptions for these key words, StyleWriter will not bother you by highlighting your vocabulary, but still highlight difficult words outside this list.