A writing enhancement tool

WhiteSmoke Writer is a word processor designed for people writing English as a foreign language.

Offering spelling and grammatical corrections on a sentence-by-sentence basis, WhiteSmoke Writer also includes style suggestions for anything you write, in any program you write with. There are also a wide variety of templates, from application letters to love poems.

During WhiteSmoke Writer’s installation, a hot key is set (default is F2), and when pressed WhiteSmoke Writer swings into action and highlights errors in the text, with suggested corrections. The dictionary and thesaurus are good. The former offers translation to several languages, and the latter gives lots of results, though without examples of usage which can be dangerous for the student of English. There is also a translator, but unfortunately it tends to translate sentences verbatim, which makes it even less effective than Google Translate.

WhiteSmoke Writer offered some corrections to non-native English speaker writings that were tested, but it was far from comprehensive and missed some important errors. In fact, Microsoft Word is just as good at grammar correction.

The templates offered in WhiteSmoke Writer are mixed. The financial templates are useful, but not great and use some weird vocabulary. There are also love letters, an apology to a brother, cheesy letters to friends, and a wedding anniversary letter, some of which have some bizarre wording and can be downright comical to read. A quick search on the internet will find better, free examples.

The idea of a language checker available at the touch of a button is a good one, but WhiteSmoke Writer’s results are still relatively weak in this 2011 version.

It’s difficult to recommend WhiteSmoke Writer, as any word processor will do corrections just as well.