Word Finder - evaluation

Word Finder Often in writing it's important not to break stride as an idea leads you down an eloquent path. If you stumble on a wrong word or stupidly repeated word, tht self-consciousness can throw you off, and stopping to grab a thesaurus for help can make you loss the thought's momentum entirely. Till now I've found Rodale's book The Synonym Finder ($19.95, Rodale Press) to be the least disruptive word fixer.

I've converted to Word Finder because its selection of alternative words is just as good as Rodale's, maybe better, and I can check it in mid-stride, as it's a "desk accessory" for the machine I'm writing on. That means I can "select" any word that's giving me pause, invoke the Word Finder desk accessory by grabbing it from the pull-down Apple menu always available on screen, and instantly a rich array of related words appears in a window (carefully placed not to cover the text being worked with), organized into nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. If I like one of the words better, or just want to try it in the sentence, I double-click on the word, and Word Finder replaces my original word with the new one, and the window vanishes. (It can do this with any text-making program -- word processing, telecom, outlining, or whatever.)

Not only haven't I lost the chain of thought, the quick glance at alternative words may have clarified the thought itself. I find I use the tool even more often than a spelling checker. For now, Word, Finder is the best word finder on the market for the Mac.

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group