Antidote User Guide

Making the Corrector‘s JobCorrection Easier

To help the corrector spot as many errors as possible, pay attention to the four following points:

Commas

Commas are powerful: a missed or misplaced comma can make your sentence fall apart. It may also leave Antidote stumped, even though it knows the most common comma-related errors. Handle your commas with care and check the relevant articles in Antidote’s guides if you need clarification.

Long sentences

Pay attention to the length of your sentences. If they get too long and include a number of nested elements, confusion can ensue. Antidote, as well as your future readers, will have an easier time understanding clear and concise sentences.

• The Readability section of the Style view helps you spot long sentences and nested phrases. Additionally, reformulations help make long sentences shorter. The Shorten and Retouch views can also help with this.

Unusual sentences

There are many ways to say the same thing in English, and Antidote is well equipped to handle most of them. However, particularly unusual phrasing can throw the corrector off, and might have the same effect on your readers. For example, if the subject is in an unexpected place, it may be misidentified for verb agreement corrections.

• The Constructions section in the Style view can spot verbless sentences. The Rewrite view in reformulation mode can also help.

Unknown words

Antidote knows more words than most of us, but English is a living entity! Like us, the corrector can analyze a sentence even if it contains a word it does not know. However, it is rarely able to propose a correction for that word. Share your knowledge with Antidote: add the unknown word to one of your personal dictionaries. When Antidote later corrects you on that word, you’ll be glad you did.

• For optimal handling, unknown words are grouped together in the list of detections in the Language view. They can also be displayed by the readability filter in the Style view.