TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
As ComputerWorld reports, the people at Doloitte Touche Tohmatsu (which
always reminds me a little too much of Wolfram and Heart) have just
released Bullfighter, 'a consulting jargon fighter' that plugs into MS
Word and PowerPoint. It's free for thirty days, and you basically you
open a document and click the "Bull Index" button on a new toolbar and
it tells you how much bollocks you've written.
Mostly, it evaluates the document for common marketing and sales terms
like 'synergy' or 'extensible'. It also applies something called the
Flesch Readability model to evaluate how easy-to-read your document is
(checking things like sentence length and syllable count).
I applied Bullfighter to a white paper I recently got, and scored a
decent 79 on the Bull Index, but only a 5.2/10 on the Bull Composite
Index (a complex combination of the diction evaluator and the Flesch
analysis). Then I ran it on an article I wrote and, while I got 95 on
the Bull Index, I once again got 5.2/10 on the BCI. Am I that
predictable?
While this isn't going to replace a good editor, it might help reduce
the ludicrous marketing-speak one regularly sees in press releases and
on Web sites. Its most useful function is to highligth those words. For
example, the aforementioned white paper has four occurrences of
'paradigm' and two of 'scalable' and 'seamless'.
Just for fun, I tried it on three of Deloitte's press releases. They all
scored well on the Bull Index, but turned up a 3.3, a 4.5 and a 4 on the
BCI. Work on that, people.
---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as:
archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
