Glossaries

Glossaries are a great way to fine-tune your tone of voice.

Use Glossaries to achieve three aims:

1) forbid certain words

2) require certain words

3) ensure correct spelling of people’s, brand names or any artificially created words

You can edit or copy your glossaries and use as many as you need with your custom tones of voice.

A glossary can be applied across multiple tones of voice or limited to a single tone.

For instance, there might be words that you deem inappropriate for all your communications, while others could be deemed unsuitable only for particular audiences or necessary exclusively in certain types of content (such as blogs or social media posts).

To use glossaries in your tone of voice:

1) In “My library”, click on + to create a new custom glossary.

Creating or editing a custom glossary in Writitude

2) Give it a telling name that explains its aim.

Editing a custom glossary's name

3) Add words one by one by pressing enter.

Predefined dictionary "Ableism" in Writitude

4) Use special functions to check for specific word forms or make an exception.

When creating or editing your custom tone of voice, choose one of the rules: “Forbid words from a custom glossary” or “Require words from a custom glossary” or “Check exact spelling”, and then pick the applicable glossary from the drop-down menu.

If you have multiple glossaries that you wish to use simultaneously, you will need to add the rule several times — once for each glossary.

For example, your tone of voice might feature three rules: “Forbid words from a custom glossary (“Words our competitors use”)”, “Forbid words from a custom glossary (“Words inconsistent with our image”)” and “Forbid words from a custom glossary (“Words that have performed poorly in ads before”)”.

The same applies to “Require words from a custom glossary” and Check exact spelling” rules — one rule for each glossary.

This is the reason why these rules will not be removed from the list in the tone of voice editing mode, unlike other rules which can only be used once.

Special functions in glossaries allow you to create a broader or narrower coverage, as well as making exceptions:

Expand contractions

Select this option if you wish to check texts for all forms of words in your glossary for the broadest coverage. Leave this field empty if you want to check only for a specific form of a word or an exact phrase, resulting in a narrower interpretation.

For instance, if you add the word 'don’t' to your dictionary and choose the 'Expand contractions' feature, Writitude will highlight both 'don’t' and 'do not' as errors.

Use lemmas

Select this option if you wish to check texts for all forms of words in your glossary for the broadest coverage. Leave this field empty if you intend to check only for a specific form of a word or an exact phrase, resulting in a narrower interpretation.

For instance, if you add the word "boost" to your dictionary and enable the "Use lemmas" feature, Writitude will identify not only "boost" but also all other forms of the same word, such as "booster" and "boosted," as mistakes.

Find only nouns or verbs

Place the tilde (~) symbol after a word and select a tag from the list to check only for a noun, verb, or another form of the word.

Example: Love~NN will flag only cases where “love” is used as a noun, not as a verb.

List of part-of-speech tags is available here.

Create an exception

Place the caret (^) symbol before a word to create an exception, meaning that this exact form of the word will not be flagged.

Example: you want to forbid word “best”, but not “^Best”, which is the last name of your CEO.