Antidote 11 User Guide

User Guide / The Corrector / The Correction Prism / Style View

Style View

Antidote can shed light on traditional stylistic concerns: repetitions, particular constructions and vocabulary. It can also evaluate the general readability of a text through its different elements. The Gender neutrality filter examines how a text can better represent both women and men without affecting its overall style. Unlike the Language and Typography views, the Style view tackles the text from a qualitative angle, without being prescriptive. The notion of error has no place here. At this stage, the corrector’s goal is to help polish the text by making it less cumbersome and by enriching it with more dynamic or inclusive vocabulary. Antidote makes your job easier by highlighting all instances of the stylistic aspect under consideration. If a sentence has to be rephrased, you can accept the alternative proposed by the corrector, edit it directly in the correction panel or return to your writing software. Not feeling particularly inspired? Double click the word and explore the main synonyms for it. Then, simply click on the synonym of your choice to insert it directly into your text.

  • Simple options, accessible at the bottom of the list of detections, allow you to personalize the results.
  • Dialogues and quotes often exhibit a particular style that you may want to leave intact. To exclude them from the style revision, see the settings in the General panel of the Corrector section.
  • Note that the underlining in the Language view remains visible in the Style view, although it is greyed out. The tooltips and their commands also remain available.

Characteristics of the detections in the Style view

The Style view presents its detections with highlighting and tooltips, and groups them by type in the list of detections. This section describes the handling of detections by this dynamic component.

  • Each tooltip has a link to a guide article corresponding to the detection. There you’ll find the reasoning behind the detection and can take inspiration from the rephrasing examples presented.
  • An interface setting (General panel > under Corrector) allows the tooltip to be displayed with the sliding of your mouse, with a shorter or longer delay, according to your preference.

The Style tooltips

The tooltip of a style detection displays suggestions and actions tailored to the type of detection for even more convenience. On some types of detection where an explanation is unnecessary (repetition, for example), the tooltip may be limited to a single line.

Approving a suggestion

Many detections have a replacement suggestion displayed in the left corner. To approve the proposed change, click on the Replace command in the tooltip. The proposed replacement then takes place in your text and the highlight disappears.

  • The tooltip shows up as soon as a suggestion is displayed, whether you click on the detection directly in the text or in the list of detections.

Sometimes lightening the text requires deleting a word or two. To approve the corrector’s suggestion, click on the Delete command in the tooltip. The highlighted portion disappears from your text, with the corrector adjusting the capitalization as needed; the detection is then deleted from the list.

  • The tooltip shows up as soon as a suggestion is displayed, whether you click on the detection directly in the text or in the list of detections.

Finding a synonym

To solve a problem of repetition or level of formality, let yourself be guided by the synonym suggestions directly through the corrector. Click on the Synonyms command in the tooltip (or right-click or double-click on the detection), then choose your replacement. Your selection is applied in the text and the detection disappears.

  • The tooltip is shown when you click on the repetition in the text. The tooltip does not appear if you click on the list of detections, so as not to hide other occurrences of the repetition.

Rephrasing

In other cases, the appropriate rephrasing must be done by hand, either directly in the correction panel with the Edit command of the tooltip, or in the original document with the command Edit in the original document from the contextual menu (right click). In the latter case, reactivate the corrector once done by clicking on its window. The modified sentence will be re-analyzed and you can continue with the correction.

  • The tooltip is shown when you click on the repetition in the text. The tooltip does not appear if you click on the list of detections, so as not to hide other occurrences of the repetition.

Ignoring a suggestion

If you do not wish to make a change proposed by Antidote, you can simply go to the next detection, or click Ignore. The original text remains intact and Antidote proceeds to the next detection. Clicking Ignore makes the highlight disappear in the text and in the list of detections.

The list of Style detections

The right panel of the corrector window displays the list of results according to the selected filter. Under Style, the list groups cases belonging to the same class together so they can be assessed uniformly, and the classes are colour coded. Only classes with at least one result are displayed in the list.

The total number of results is displayed to the right of the title of each class. If there are more than five, click and x others… to see them all, and Reduce to 5 results… to revert to the original view. To disable the detection of a given class, uncheck the corresponding box to the right of the section title in the list of detections. To hide the results of a given class from the list of detections, click on the chevron to the left of the section title.

Just as in the Language and Typography views, you can restrict the display of the list to a specific word. Go to the section Correction process for more details.

  • The filters that show the “%” symbol above the list of detections allow you to see the results as a percentage of each class of detection.
  • Some filters allow you to sort the results according to different angles. If necessary, click on the button to see the sorting options specific to the current filter.
  • The button, to the right of the filter name (when the mouse is hovered), allows you to access the guide articles corresponding to the filter.

The influence of language correction on the Style view

To determine the detections of the Style view and the cases corresponding to its various revision, statistics and inspection filters as precisely as possible, Antidote uses the results of the corrector’s analysis. This is how it can distinguish a number that is part of a date from another denoting a quantity, how it can work on several sentences at the same time and detect entire passages and not just individual words, and how it can even isolate elements of pragmatics.

Consequently, the quality of the detections relies directly on that of the corrector’s analysis: if the analysis is weak, the detections will be too. For example, an unknown proper noun will sometimes be classified as a place rather than a person, or a passive phrase will be misinterpreted.

This is why we strongly advise that you make the suggested corrections in the Language view, as well as resolve its analysis difficulties (for example, adding unknown proper nouns to a personal dictionary), before you go on to check style and other prisms. The results will be all the better for it.