DrivelDefenceText will help authors assess their writing for Plain English as part of a general effort to improve accessibility. If you are mainly interested in checking web pages, look at the associated product DrivelDefenceWeb.
DrivelDefenceText is Freeware and must not be sold.
DrivelDefenceText will:
DrivelDefenceText will NOT:
DrivelDefenceText is written as a web page, and runs within a web browser.
The text you may want to check will typically have been prepared in another application, eg. a word processor. Select the text from that application and copy it to the clipboard. Then, paste it into DrivelDefenceText. You can paste in extra text, or edit the text until you are happy.
This text will be analysed and a report produced, based upon the report preferences that you set:
Clicking the 'Analyse' button will cause the plain text to be examined and reported in line with the settings made during Step 1. The report will open in a new browser window, and is itself a web page. Items are reported in the order in which they appear in the original web page. The report can be printed using the 'Print' button at the top of the report. If you want to keep a file copy of the report (eg. to e-mail to someone), you will need to do this manually. This is because JavaScript will not allow files to be saved automatically. To save the file:
DrivelDefenceText will not make any changes to the examined text. It is up to you to use the report to make any changes to the text in its originating application (eg. word processor). Note however that the average sentence length for a page is expected to be between 15 and 20 words. See the Plain English Campaign guide 'How to write in plain English'.
To analyse more text, click the DrivelDefenceText 'Reset' button. This will close all previously opened windows and reset the contents of the form.
This message will appear at the top of the DrivelDefenceText page. DrivelDefenceText uses JavaScript, and will not work unless your browser is set up to allow JavaScript to run. Check your browser security settings. Once you have enabled JavaScript, reload the DrivelDefenceText page and you will no longer see this message.
When you click the 'Analyse' button, normally a dialog box will appear telling you how many characters and sentences have been extracted from the entered text. Sometimes however, this may also be supplemented by 'WARNING: extracted text does not end in a complete sentence. It ends with the following sentence fragment, which will not be included in the analysis: ....'. This means that the entered text contains words at its end that do not form a complete sentence (eg. because there is no final full stop). You will need to end the sentence properly to prevent getting this warning, and to make sure that the text is included in the analysis.
This can sometimes occur if you are analysing a large amount of text, or have asked for more things to be included in a page report. The browser realises that the page script has been running for a while, and thinks something may have gone wrong. Continue to run the script and it should finish successfully.
Don't forget to check the Plain English Campaign website for the latest tips on using Drivel Defence.