With all the hype around AI and the grey area around using generative AI, especially for Postgraduate Research Students, I wanted to share one of my favourite Editing (and Writing) tools. It’s free, plugs into Word and doesn’t use generative AI or steals your data.

Say Hello to Dr Helen Sword’s Writer’s Diet. This plug-in (and accompanying book) are great tools to improve your writing.

So how does the plug-in work and what does it do? Once you install the plug-in via Microsoft Store it will show up in your Word Home task bar. It sits there until you click on it to analyse your text. The Writer’s diet scans your text for key words and colour codes them for you. Based on your score it provides a smiley score and descriptive analysis. If you don’t want to use diet and fitness terminology you can change the theme via the settings. I opted for weather related terminology.

There are 5 areas the plug-in focuses on be-verbs, zombie-nouns (also known as nominalisations), prepositions, adjectives and adverbs, and waste words like: it, this, that, there. You can add exclusion areas for example quotes or words in tables. In addition, you can create your own list of exclusion words. This is very handy, given that a lot of research related words are nominalisations. This should then improve your smiley rating.

Once you have written 100 or more words deploy the plug-in (via the Word Home menu) to analyse your text. Since it’s a plug-in it can analyse an entire thesis as well. Depending on your word count, the analysis might be broken down into sections.

How do I use the Writer’s Diet?
After I have written a few pages, I enable the plug-in to see patterns, or words I use a lot. This then allows me to re-investigate my writing. Was this the best word to use, have I been using the same word over and over? It also highlights redundant adjectives and adverbs, that I can easily remove without losing the meaning. Actually reducing the use of these ad-words can improve the precision of my writing. For me the main benefits of this tool are

  • areas to focus on without getting distracted by my writing
  • having a conversation with my writing

I also use this tool when PGRs share their writing with me for additional feedback. This is a great tool to identify areas that I should focus on, allowing me to provide feedback faster.

Why not give the Writer’s Diet a go and share how you get on.