MINSKY@OZ.AI.MIT.EDU (05/04/87)
I agree with Todd, Ogasawara: one should not criticise to extremes. I found RightWriter useful and suggestive. It was helpful in detecting obnoxious passive constructions and excessively long sentences. In final editing of "The Society of Mind" I used spelling checkers to notify me of unfamiliar words, and I often replaced them by more familiar ones. I also used it to establish a "gradient". The early chapters are written at a "grade level" of about 8.6 and the book ends up with grade levels more like 13.2 - using RightWriter's quaint scale. Naturally the program makes lots of errors, but they are instantly obvious and easily ignored. I imposed a "style gradient" upon "The Society of Mind" because I wanted its beginning to be accessible to non-specialists. I cheerfully assumed that any reader who gets to the end will by then have become a specialist.