Elite Minds RightWriter 5.0 review

RightWriter is a standalone grammar-checking program.

We compared it with Microsoft Word's built-in tool and WhiteSmoke. While WhiteSmoke runs actively in the background and appears when you start typing, RightWriter sits in a window and waits for you to cut and paste text into it. No formatting is carried across, and once the program has checked your grammar, you're left to correct the original document or cut and paste the text back. A few characters, such as curly quotes, came out as gibberish.

Clicking the Analyze button produces an assessment of your text divided into Analysis, Correction and Summary tabs. The first contains general comments on writing style. RightWriter detected many of our deliberate mistakes, but was less reliable at proposing solutions. For example, our letter began 'With regards to', which should have been 'With regard to'. WhiteSmoke ignored this, but both Word and RightWriter suggested we change the phrase to 'About' - less wordy, but not an appropriate opening. RightWriter correctly identified use of the passive voice, which is often better avoided in everyday writing; in this, it matched Word and bettered WhiteSmoke. It was unique in drawing our attention to long sentences and complex structure, asking 'Is sentence too difficult?'

The Correction tab lists more specific errors. RightWriter was similar to WhiteSmoke and better than Word at detecting disagreements between verb, article, number and so on: for example, it corrected 'an highly experienced person' to 'a highly' and 'two referee' to 'two referees'. It had the same blind spot as WhiteSmoke with noun subjects: 'she aim to deliver' was corrected to 'aims', but 'the company aim...' was left unflagged. Neither 'if it is you're intention' nor 'Your faithfully' were corrected.

Finally, the Summary tab measures text for readability using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Flesch Index and Fog Index. It then rates properties such as strength (are sentences short and active?), descriptiveness (frequency of adjectives and adverbs) and jargon (occurrence of 'buzzwords'). The results are of limited value, but could be useful if you need reminding to write plain and simple English.

RightWriter's spellchecker does an acceptable job but lacks handy extras such as spotting two capital letters at the start of a word. Only US English is included, but the software finds other dictionaries on your PC and lists them in Tools.

We had some problems with this software. Our copy would only run if the user was logged in as an administrator. In addition, a button to run Word's grammar and spellchecker (if installed) within RightWriter didn't work.

Ultimately, grammar software is only as good as its suggested corrections. RightWriter didn't impress us any more than other examples we've tried, and it feels rough around the edges. Still, it's more sensibly priced than its competitor, WhiteSmoke. It's worth buying if you require more help than Word's grammar checker provides, or if you simply need a second opinion.