List and explain three tools to improve wording and sentence structure using word processing.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

When you are satisfied with the flow of ideas in your document, you can drill down to the sentence level and do a bit of wordsmithing using features such as the thesaurus, Search and Replace, grammar checker, readability statistics, and spelling checker.

Thesaurus. Your word processing software might provide a thesaurus that you can use to find synonyms for trite and overused words.

Search and replace. You can also use your word processor's Search and Replace feature to hunt down words that you tend to overuse. For example, if you habitually overuse the word ‘typically', you can use Search and Replace to find each occurrence of ‘typically', and then decide whether you should substitute a different word, such as ‘usually' or ‘ordinarily'.

Grammar checker. A grammar checker reads through your document and points out potential grammatical trouble spots, such as incomplete sentences, misused words, incorrect punctuation, and verbs that don't agree with nouns.

Readability statistics. To find out if your writing style is suitable for your target audience, your word processing software might be able to analyze the reading level of your document based on the document's average number of syllables per word and words per sentence. For most documents, you can target average readers.

Spelling checker. Word processing software can also help you find and fix spelling errors. A spelling checker compares each word in your document to an electronic dictionary. For words not found in the dictionary, the spelling checker displays a list of possible corrections.