Power editing. (Artificial Linguistics's PowerEdit, word processing software) (product announcement)
by Alan R. Bechtold

You've heard of power lunches, power brokers, and power deals. Now there's power editing. Good writers know their best work requires a second pair of eyes to double-check - at the very least - for grammar, spelling, and those inevitable typing errors.

Artificial Linguistics says its new program, PowerEdit, is the first software product to intelligently read, manage, and manipulate text. To perform the functions of a human editor and proofreader, PowerEdit employs proprietary artificial-intelligence technology - a text engine - that produces a quantifiable database it uses to intelligently manipulate text. It finds and corrects problems associated with business writing - lack of clarity, wordiness, ambiguity, and incorrect grammar.

PowerEdit's text engine recognizes more than 1 million words and their usages and applies 200,000 rules of good writing to your writing. It works directly with word processing software, recommending changes to make writing powerful, clear, precise, and correct. Artificial Linguistics president Doug Kramp says the company plans to eventually license the text engine to software publishers for other applications needing intelligent text manipulation, making it a type of operating system or environment in which word processors and other software programs can run. The program sells for $295.