Word Plug-Ins

Pick a pack of tools to use with MS Word, thanks to Roger J. Carlson. Easily count lines, phrases and words. Find and highlight passive words, prepositions and adverbs. Highlight the latter two for elimination if you wish. The potent Adverb Eliminator highlights the offenders for deletion, using Word's Track Changes feature. Of course, I'd advocate not inserting adverbs in the first place, but some people just can't control themselves. Roger to the rescue!

He also offers a five-page Word document with screen shots on how to build a Word macro to find and highlight dull or passive words you might want to consider replacing to spark up your writing. He suggests finding alternatives to this list: is, isn't, am, are, aren't, was, wasn't, were, will, would, won't, has, had, have, be, been, do, don't, did, didn't, does, doesn't, seem, seems, exist, exists, appears, make, makes, show, shows, occur, occurs, get, got, went, put, some, many, most, that, very, extremely, totally, completely, wholly, utterly, quite, rather, slightly, fairly, somewhat, and suddenly.

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