In this week's bonus, we talk to Daniel Heuman and Chris Ryder about two free tools that save time for editors and writers. We look at StyleWorks, a free website for building style sheets, and why one entry for "color" also has to catch "colorful" and "discolor." Then we look at wildcard searching in Word, which lets you fix a whole pattern at once instead of hunting down each instance by hand.
In this week's bonus, we talk to Daniel Heuman and Chris Ryder about two free tools that save time for editors and writers. We look at StyleWorks, a free website for building style sheets, and why one entry for "color" also has to catch "colorful" and "discolor." Then we look at wildcard searching in Word, which lets you fix a whole pattern at once instead of hunting down each instance by hand.
Find Daniel and Chris on LinkedIn, and find more about their projects at Perfectit.com.
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| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
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Mignon Fogarty: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. We are here today with Daniel Heuman and Chris Ryder from Intelligent Editing. In the main segment, we talked all about what AI means for editors and mistakes that AI makes that you might not expect. It was fascinating. If you haven't heard that, check it out. As Daniel said, we went really deep and geeky into the language and what editing is. But now we're going to talk about two really cool free tools that they have for editors, and writers, but editors mostly. So first of all, welcome back, guys. Thanks for being here.
Chris Ryder: Thank you.
Daniel Heuman: Thank you.
Mignon: So StyleWorks is a huge nod to the fact that editors, we all use style sheets, and they're an important part of our workflow. They're just critical documents for our work, but they're kind of unwieldy. So you have something called StyleWorks, which is free, it's not AI, and it's to help—I believe it's to help editors make better style sheets. Can you tell me more about it?
Daniel: Absolutely. I'm going to immediately disagree with you and say that style sheets are not unwieldy. In fact, every effort to try to automate them has failed completely because it's so hard to beat the simplicity of a style sheet. So to explain, a style sheet is what an editor will make as their list of preferences as they're working on a document, a book, whatever it might be. Track your preferences on a piece of paper, write them down. Maybe you do it in a document, maybe you've got two screens and a separate one for your style sheet. But it's a list of preferences, just can be individual words. You can use it to keep track of characters in a novel and what they do and making sure that you're up to date on each one so that you can spot an inconsistency or when something is incoherent in a story. Yes, they're unwieldy in the sense, you're absolutely right, that that can get very long and very intricate, and of course it's just a long list of text.
Mignon: You can do different ones for different projects.
Daniel: Yeah. But the attempts to automate them are worse, and that includes our attempts. Let's be honest with that. So attempts to automate them start with a principle that computers will work by looking for one thing and replacing or suggesting with another. Find and replace, find and suggest. And that's really inefficient compared to a style sheet. In a style sheet, you can write the word "advisor" with an O, and you just write that one word, and you don't need to write, "Look for every instance of advisor with the E and replace it with the O." But if you program any software you choose, not just our own, they're all built around this premise of find and replace. If you want to build a style sheet into automation, you must specify what to look for and what to replace. So that's twice as unwieldy as any style sheet before you begin. Now let me add on the plural: "advisors." Well, if you're trying to automate, you can't assume that it follows the same thing because you get to words like "apple" and "apples." Well, the singular one can be a famous company—you may have heard of them—the plural is not. So they're different, and you can't build that into a list in that way. So that style sheet, yes, okay, it's unwieldy, by the time you build all those things in, it's about 90% less unwieldy than the automated versions. The automated ones take so much time to set up that we have fiction editors who simply—they'll love our program for its consistency, but they won't use all the style sheet or house style type functionality because for them, if it's separate to one book, it's not worth building everything in if you're only going to use it once. The observation behind StyleWorks is: could it be possible to imitate that style sheet, that form of functionality that a style sheet has online, so that you would write something once and the computer would figure out all the rest? Now, we had that idea five or six years ago because it turns out that's really hard to do in practice, and that vision of "you write it once and it figures out the rest," well, that landed in Chris's lap, so he had to do a lot of the actual linguistic work behind that and the way it should work or when it can't cover it and all the ins and outs of that. But as a premise as to what we were trying to do, hopefully that gives you an idea.
Mignon: Yeah. Chris, what were some of the big challenges in putting this together?
Chris: Yeah, I mean, it was essentially just trying to sort of categorize all the words by thinking about, if you put this word in because you want this spelling, like "color"—it's obvious if you put the word "color," as Daniel says, you know that you're talking about whether it's got the U in it or not, if it's O-R or O-U-R at the end. But there are so many words that have the word "color" in them. Apart from "coloring," "colored," "colors," "colorize," "colorizing," "colorization," "colorful," "colorless," and then all the prefixed ones, "discolor," "multicolor"—a good sort of 40 to 50 words. And so it was a challenge to sort of go through and just categorize every word by, "Okay, if I put this word in, what are all the words that I want to also capture when I'm doing this?" Because the last thing you want to do is to start putting in all of those prefixed and suffixed versions. It's just a nightmare. So it's not just about knowing the inflected ones, but all the derived forms and everything. And even working backwards, you know, when you see a word and think, "Okay, that's a very complex word," work backwards. What's the base? What is it you actually want to put into StyleWorks that captures that and then all the sort of derived words from it?
Mignon: Right. There's a joke on the edge of my memory that I can't quite find, but I've seen examples online where people did find and replace and it created some monstrous word because the word they were replacing was in the middle of another word and it came out ridiculous and they didn't notice.
Daniel: The classic example is "mage" and "wizard." Might be the one you're thinking of, because a mage and a wizard is just a preference. You don't need to worry about it until you hit the word "image," and suddenly you've created an "iWizard." And I don't know what an iWizard is, but I want one!
Mignon: Perfect. That's the kind of thing I was thinking of. So is that the kind of thing you're talking about, Chris, the things you're trying to avoid there?
Chris: Yes, partly, yeah. That kind of thing and making sure, as I say, you capture all the derived terms so that you don't want users to have to think about all the extra terms that are going to be. Because it's great if you're capturing "color" and changing it, and then "colors" and "coloring." But as I say, there's all these derived forms, and then if you've still got "colorful" and "colorless" and "multicolor" with the wrong spelling, then all you've actually done is introduce an inconsistency rather than correct every single version, you know? So you've got to be thorough.
Mignon: Fascinating. Yeah. So how does it work? So the tool is meant to sort of create a style sheet that plugs into PerfectIt and helps people use your product with their style sheet, but you've also said like anyone can use it to make a style sheet for their own. So how do you do that? Do you just go online and start entering it in and get out this nice template?
Daniel: Absolutely. So this is the first version that we've introduced, and the priority here was our Mac users who previously did not have any way of building their styles into PerfectIt. So that's who we were thinking of to begin with. But StyleWorks has this ability to have certain lines where you are feeding into the product, and you put Chris's example "color," and it plays into the product. But it also has the ability to just write anything you want, no different to a Word document in that sense. You can put anything in. The idea was long-term, can we make this just the obvious go-to place for a style sheet, whether or not you're using our product? You can put this in. It makes it easier to export—we have a commercial interest in that—but even if someone's using a different product, why can't they have a dedicated place for their style sheet that tracks and manages and makes it easier to reuse elements from a book they may have worked on years before? So yeah, it's all up and running now. To get an account for it is free because we do want, certainly in the long term, but the ability exists already to just go and have a place for your style sheets, which is styleworks.app, and you can create an account for free and start tracking style sheets there. And we hope that people will use it to link out to PerfectIt, but you don't have to.
Mignon: So now you said that the user loads the data into the system, or the style sheet gets loaded into the system, and I know this isn't an AI product, so it's not being used in training, but because you said that, it made me think like, well, what are the privacy issues surrounding the style sheets that people make with StyleWorks?
Daniel: So our assumption is that style sheets don't tend to be super sensitive documents. It's a list of terms with an implied find and replace. So what we said is that on a free product, if you enter something there, we do want to be able to improve the product based on that. So we haven't yet got round to actually using any data at all for this—we're still building the product—but over the long term, we want to be able to say, "Okay, these are the terms that StyleWorks did not automatically know all the find and replace variations for. We've got users adding them. Let me pile that in and make the product better by putting those in a list and having it auto-identify it." So that's very much the goal. We haven't done any of that yet. I don't see a lot of privacy concerns around that. But equally, if someone was writing something super sensitive, if for some reason there was a style sheet where the words themselves need to be protected—maybe there's a drug in development or something where for some reason a word and its spellings and misspellings are secret and confidential—then I wouldn't put those on StyleWorks. I would say keep those on a pen and paper, keep those in a Word doc on your machine. If it's that level of sensitivity, I wouldn't do it. But for most uses, I don't think there's any harm in having a product that helps everyone by using that data to give better results.
Mignon: Okay, well, good to know. Good to know. And then we're going to finish by talking about this wonderful, weird book that Chris wrote that I loved that I didn't think I'd love. It's called "Brave New Word." It's filled with puns, which I'm a sucker for a good pun. And it's about wildcard searching in Word, and I don't even use Word—it made me think about switching to Word, it was so interesting, all the complicated but very useful find and replace you can do. And I have to say, Chris, the cover of it—maybe you didn't design the cover, but the cover was very intimidating! It looks like these complicated math algorithms or something, but it turns out that these are wildcard search terms. So for people who don't know, can you give sort of an overview of what wildcard searching really is in Word?
Chris: Yeah, I think you're right. I think a lot of people sort of don't know it's just sitting there to use. But you have normal find and replace: you can look for one particular word, replace it with another particular word. But language is messy, but it does actually have quite a lot of patterns in it. And what wildcards let you do is search for a pattern and replace it with the thing that you want to replace that pattern with. So instead of looking for—if you want to look for years, four-digit years, you would normally have to look for each individual year to replace it with something else, whereas this way you can look for all years that are four digits long. An example I've seen before is if you want a space between the copyright symbol and a year, you don't need to look for copyright 1990, copyright 1991, and do them all. You can just say, "When you find a copyright symbol followed by four numbers, put a space in between." So that's essentially it: patterns of language, and how you can sort of exploit that to do massive edits very quickly.
Mignon: It's incredibly powerful. I think if you use Word and you aren't using wildcard searching, you probably want to because it'll save you a lot of time, and this book, "Brave New Word"—it's more than 100 pages, so at one point you referred to it as a pamphlet or something, but I would call it a book—it is a great introduction to these wildcard searches. How long did it take you to write?
Chris: Oh gosh, I'm not sure. Probably two or three months or so alongside other sort of things I've been doing. But yeah, I can't really remember actually. It was a lot of last year.
Daniel: Wildcards come incredibly easy to Chris. That would take the rest of us years to write. It's really remarkable.
Chris: I've always enjoyed what I call the math of language. I have a sort of math-y brain even though I'm a linguist, but it's very useful for things like wildcards where it is essentially like boiling language down to mathematical patterns in a way.
Mignon: Very useful, and also very entertaining. So I guess that's our first book recommendation for this segment. And now we're going to go on to our pleasure reading recommendations. I would call "Brave New Word" pleasure reading, but you know, I think probably aren't going to give it to someone as a Christmas gift.
Daniel: Well, that's because it's free. It wouldn't be a great gift if it's free.
Chris: Yeah, and I didn't think I'd better recommend my own book as one of my three. I thought I'd leave that to Daniel, actually, assuming it's one of his three.
Mignon: Well, he did! He's the one that told me about it, so it was a book recommendation that Daniel gave to me. So let's start. Daniel, what are your three? I know you are a new father, and I think that you brought us some children's books.
Daniel: I brought the books to reflect my reading in the last year, Mignon. Abigail is now just over a year. I can say with some confidence that I have read nothing for pleasure in that time. It has been busy, but yes, I brought a show and tell in line with the theme. So the book that I have read the most is "Goodnight Moon," which is just every single time I read this to her—this is every bedtime and every nap—it is now the book that I've read the most times in my life. Every time I put it down, I'm like, "That is a lovely book." I think every single time, it's just remarkable, it's so well done, it's so well put together. But that reflects, I'm well into three figures of how many times I've read that. The next is going to shock you, Mignon, not because of what the book is, but because of the context here: Dr. Seuss isn't a thing in the UK in the same way.
Mignon: Oh! I love Dr. Seuss.
Daniel: I'm half American. Everyone loves Dr. Seuss. I thought the whole world would have Dr. Seuss as its thing. It didn't occur to me that I could mention "Green Eggs and Ham" to someone and people would look at me like, "What? Why? Why would they be that color?" That makes no sense to me.
Mignon: Fascinating! I had no idea.
Daniel: Right? It did not occur to me that Dr. Seuss could be anything other than huge in every country, but he's not. My wife's American, so we've made sure that Abigail is getting a lot of Dr. Seuss, and if I'm honest, I had not read "The Lorax"—plenty of times "Green Eggs and Ham," but "The Lorax" is just incredible. Serious themes of environmentalism in it, but taught to children at a very young age and taught in a way that helps with reading. It's just a remarkable book. And then those two are famous. This one is not: "How to Hide a Lion." A friend gave it to us. When she gave it to us, she read it. Abigail was a newborn at the time. Abigail wasn't very interested, but the two of us were so transfixed with this reading. It's that well-written. "It’s not easy, but Iris has to do her best. After…” Oh, sorry. It’s “Where can a very small girl hide a very large lion? It's not easy, but Iris has to do her best. After all, moms and dads can be funny about having a lion in the house." And the whole thing's written like that. It's just really, really incredible. A lion strolls into town looking to buy a hat, and what happens next?
Mignon: Oh, fun! Oh, that's lovely. Well, thank you. I'm sure the parents in the audience will appreciate those recommendations. And yeah, I am just shocked about Dr. Seuss. My favorite is "If I Ran the Zoo," so that's probably why I became an entrepreneur.
Daniel: I'm not sure we have that one, and if we do not, I'm going to get it.
Mignon: Yes, good one. It's a good one.
Chris: Yeah, I've not heard of that one.
Mignon: Oh no, it's great. Okay, so Chris, what are your recommendations for us?
Chris: Yeah, we've got a range between us, for sure. My first one is by one of my favorite authors. It's called Ian Pears, this is called "The Portrait." It's actually not my favorite one of his, although it's very good. The reason I choose it is because there's a language element, because this is written in second person, which you get very rarely. It's sort of narrated by someone who is painting somebody else, and he's saying "you" rather than "I" or "he"—it's second person—and it's just him sort of rambling on as he's painting this person, and this sort of twisted story emerges from what he's saying, and you realize something awful's happened. It's this really sort of fascinating story. So I kind of love that for its linguistic creativity.
Mignon: Yeah, years ago I tried to find books that were written in second person to use as an example, and there were hardly any, so that's great.
Chris: Yeah. Oh no, I really recommend that, and all of his. I love his, they're great. My second one is kind of language-y. It's called "The Meaning of Liff." It's by John Lloyd and Douglas Adams. And they basically, they decided that there are all these sort of place names all over signs all over the world just sitting there not doing anything. So they've decided to give definitions to a lot of place names for concepts that don't have words. So just to pick an example, "lamborine" I quite like: feeling better for having put pajamas on. And honestly, every one is an absolute gem, and I do my best to try and get them in everyday conversation because I think they're fantastic.
Daniel: I remember… I haven't read that book in maybe 30 years, but I remember it so well that I can do some of them for you from memory! "Addis Ababa" is the torrent of incomprehensible gibberish that spews from cars with loudspeakers. "Corrievorrie" is the feeling when someone is at a distance to you, the amount of time it takes before you have to fake saying hello to them or pretend not to see them because otherwise you have to initiate this strange ritual.
Chris: Yeah, exactly! And "Woking" I like, because that's quite near me as well: standing in the kitchen wondering what you came in for. It's just, yeah, it's wonderful.
Mignon: This is a great recommendation.
Chris: My third one is probably the most British thing I own. It was given to me many, many years ago, and I've still got it. It's called "Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down," and it's a book just all about tea and biscuits, as in cookies, and how to enjoy it, and all that kind of thing. I just love it. Every now and then I sort of dip in and read one of its reviews of custard creams or various other British biscuits, and it's really good. My favorite thing is he says, "If 'Back to the Future' were made by a British company, then it wouldn't have this sort of flux capacitor or its plutonium core. It would have a twin pack of custard creams and an armchair," and that sort of thing.
Mignon: That's wonderful!
Chris: I love that one.
Mignon: That's great. These are wonderful recommendations. Thank you so much, and thank you for being here. Where can people find you online?
Daniel: Our company is Intelligent Editing, but everyone knows the product, which is perfectit.com. I think Chris and I are both on LinkedIn. The book will be at perfectit.com, it is "Brave New Word." If you look for it, I'm pretty sure that Google will think that that is a mistake and will send you to "Brave New World," which is not, sadly, something that Chris wrote. But if you go to the PerfectIt website and go to resources or learning or something like that, the "Brave New Word" book is free, and people can grab it.
Mignon: Thank you so much.
Daniel: Thank you.
Chris: Thanks.