Bottom line: Provides good advice but uses clumsy technology
Review: ClearEdits rightly emphasises plain language and provides mostly good advice. The advice is not as comprehensive as StyleWriter or Editor. But it's the technology behind the software that is ClearEdits' major weakness.
We didn't receive any errors when we tried ClearEdits on our test documents, but ClearEdits took several minutes longer than other software to process our long document (100 pages). When ClearEdits takes its time "counting things" and "thinking really hard" — to use the software's own words — you cannot open any other files until ClearEdits has finished.
When ClearEdits finishes processing a document, the software marks the document with comments. Some of these comments might be a little unclear to a novice writer, such as this advice on using "between":
- Compare seeming synonyms - 'between' (two or two at a time)
'among' (three or more)
To edit our document, we could see no other option than going through ClearEdits' suggestions one-by-one. These suggestions were often repeated; there seems to be no way to tell ClearEdits to "Ignore" a suggestion or to "Ignore All".
If you like a suggestion, then you apparently must edit the document manually rather than clicking "Accept". If you don't like a suggestion, then you apparently must delete the comment rather than clicking "Reject". Even after you have deleted all the rejected comments, it seems you must press another button to "clean up" your document to remove all the highlights that ClearEdits has made during processing.
But the software does have some good points. For example, the software lets you define your own rules; gives you the choice between US spelling and British spelling; and is reasonably priced at $79.95.