The ROBERT GUNNING EDITOR is a lightweight readability editor to help you identify complexity and wordiness in your text. The editor will help you write more concisely for your intended audience.
Click on the READABILITY EDITOR tab to edit your text. The ROBERT GUNNING EDITOR screen looks like this:
You can work in either plain text or rich-text.
The first row of buttons include the following:
- IMPORT A FILE: Click the button to import a file. Text files (.txt) work best because no conversion is needed. Files like MS-WORD, OpenOffice, HTML, .rtf, etc. contain rich-text and are converted to retain formatting like bold-face, italics, font sizes, images, etc. Conversion takes more system resources and processing power.
- SAVE TEXT AS: Click the button to save your text. You can save as .txt, .docx, .rtf, or .HTML. (It’s not possible to save your text as a .pdf). TIP: if you don’t need to retain text formatting, then save as .txt. If you need to retain formatting, save as .html since nearly all software programs and apps can import as .html without problems.
- LOAD SAMPLE TEXT: Double-click the button to load a sample text. We provide 30+ sample texts to load in.
- PASTE FROM CLIPBOARD: Pastes anything from the Clipboard into the text area.
- COPY ALL TEXT: Copies all text in the text area to the Clipboard. It will retain all rich-text formatting.
- CLEAR HIGHLIGHTS: Click once to remove any text highlights.
- CLEAR TEXT AREA: Double-click to clear all text and the cache.
- SYSTEM SETTINGS: Click the button and a popup will appear with system settings.
The second row of buttons include:
EDIT HARD WORDS: Click once to underscore all hard words in your text. Double-click on any hard word to find any easier word. Different colored-underscores indicate different word complexities.
EDIT ADJ./ADVERBS: Click once to highlight adverbs and adjectives in your text. The highlights will help you remove unneeded adjectives and adverbs. Click once on the adj/adverb to delete, or click twice to replace with a synonym.
EDIT WORDY PHRASES: Click once to highlight wordy phrases in your text. Click on the highlighted word or phrase to see the error and how to fix it.
HIGHLIGHT NOMINALIZATIONS: Click once to highlight all nominalizations in your text. Mouse-over any highlighted word to get the verb form. (Learn more about nominalizations)
HIGHLIGHT FUZZY WORDS: Click once to highlight all fuzzy words. Fuzzy words are words that can be vague, ambiguous, or too general. Mouse-over any highlighted word to see the reason why.
HIGHLIGHT WEAK VERBS: Click once to highlight weak verbs and phrases in your text. Review the highlights to see if you can rewrite the weak phrases using strong verbs.
HIGHLIGHT MISUSED WORDS: Click once to highlight common misused words. Mouse-over any highlight see see if you’re using the correct word.
CHECK MISSPELLINGS: Click once to find common misspellings. The app uses your browser’s inbuilt spellchecker, but we added 3000K additional checks to ensure you’ve spelled all words correctly.
PARTS OF SPEECH: Click the button once to highlight all parts of speech in your text.
SYLLABLES: Click the button once to show syllable counts of every word. Words are color-coded to indicate number of syllables.
PASSIVE WORDS: Click once to highlight all passive words that contribute to passive voice in a sentence.
PASSIVE SENTENCES: Click once to highlight all passive voice sentences.
LONG SENTENCES: Click once to highlight all long sentences. A high percentage of long sentences indicates complexity in your text.
NON-SENTENCES: Click once to highlight all non-sentences. Non-sentences include titles, headers, subheaders, bulleted text, links, and run-on sentences. Because readability formulas score connected text (i.e. sentences), any non-sentence adds complexity. (You can change how formulas score sentences in the app’s SYSTEM SETTINGS).
COGNITIVE READING LOAD: Click once to use the Cognitive Reading Load tool.
The screen will refresh with the Cognitive Reading Load screen.
To see cognitive load on your text and how it affects readers, click one of the three buttons: Cognitive Sentence Load; Cognitive Text Load; or Cognitive Words Load.
SYNONYM FINDER ON/OFF: Click to toggle. When on, you can double-click on a word to find a replacement word.
ENABLE FULL-EDITING SCREEN: Click the button once to expand the screen to show more editing space. Click again to return to normal editing.
