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I really like the workflow concept and I hope it works well. But what professional writer on earth would find any value in this feature that they're so proud of
by crux 13y ago
I really like the workflow concept and I hope it works well. But what professional writer on earth would find any value in this feature that they're so proud of, SYNTAX CONTROL™? This isn't a knock on iA Writer specifically. Writing and word processing apps have been touting this kind of thing for a long time—15 years ago it was Flesch-Kincaid scoring. This feature stuck around for ages (it's still there, I presume) despite the niggling persistent truth that for any given text written for and by fluent English speakers, increasing its 'readability' only made it more stilted, patronizing, and sort of... lobotomized.
So now there's a tool that highlights parts of speech. The problem is the same as the readability scores: the level of insight that an ordinary, untrained, consumer-level word processor can bring to bear on written English is completely trivial compared to the needs of any writer. The ability to load in vocabulary lists for what you think are parts of speech, like the ability to count word and sentence length (less so, frankly), is like the ability to detail a car with a sledgehammer.
Editing prose is a matter of taste and thus a very, very difficult problem to solve programmatically. I don't blame software developers for continuing to try. I laud them. But to bring this feature to market—indeed, to make it the centerpiece of your pitch? You have to ask what segment of the target audience would benefit. What dedicated writer is actually so adrift in the English language that they need a simple, boneheaded machine to hold their hand through the most delicate and important part of their workflow?