My personal word dictionary

2023-04-13

5mod

Everyone has a personal vocabulary that contains at least a few important, unique words or word combinations.

We also have terms that are part of our professional language or personal style. We want to keep them and never change them into something else.

InstaText’s Personal dictionary allows you to enter multi-word entries, which is especially handy. Why? Continue to learn more…

Illustrative example

Let’s start with a simple example. We want to check the following text for possible improvements:

In the financial industry, time series prediction is sometimes used to predict a credit score of a company.

Here is the original output by InstaText:

I understand that “time series forecasting” means practically the same as “time series prediction”. However, as an author, I may prefer “time series prediction” (e.g., I am using this term throughout my article or book).

Now I add the following entry to the dictionary:

My problem is solved: InstaText won’t bother me with “time series forecasting” (as a replacement for “time series prediction”) anymore.

How to use your Personal dictionary

Clicking on the small icon next to your name above the InstaText editor opens a window like the one in the image below.

InstaText allows you to improve your writing and editing experience by adding terms (i.e. words or word combinations) to your personal dictionary.

There are two different ways this can be done:
– Don’t change: this <term> should always stay as it is.
– Stop changing: <term1> should never be changed to <term2>.

Don’t change

There are particular terms that I never want to be changed such as “threefold repetition” in the domain of chess.

Suppose that InstaText originally suggested correcting “threefold repetition” to “a triple repetition”.

After including a relation don’t change “threefold repetition”, InstaText will no longer include this suggestion:

Stop changing

As another case, suppose that InstaText originally suggested correcting “credit score” to “credit rating” in the following sentence:

After including a relation stop changing “credit score” (the from term) to “credit rating” (the to term), InstaText will no longer include this suggestion:

Caveats and more details for advanced users

The English language is rich in possibilities, and the retention of word combinations is a complex problem. A seemingly small change can sometimes have big consequences. InstaText therefore hides markup only for exact matches of “green-red” terms. In the following example, the words high and good are also part of the markup, so the dictionary does not trigger in this case, but leaves the decision of what to keep to the user.

The company has a high credit rating good credit score as its equity ratio is high.

We need to be especially careful with the don’t change option. It is particularly useful for combinations of words that make sense but are rarely used – like “threefold repetition” in the example above, the otherwise largely unknown term is often used to describe the repetition of moves in a game of chess. We certainly don’t want to use this option for common terms, especially if they contain only one word.

Keep in mind that InstaText hides markup only for exact matches of terms in your dictionary, to protect you from unwanted behaviour. Therefore:

– Plural forms are not automatically included, they must be entered manually.
– All terms are case sensitive.
– In the stop changing setting both terms should be exactly the same, otherwise the suggestion may still occur (see example below).

In the following example, InstaText still suggests replacing “credit score” with “credit rating” because there are other changes associated with these terms.

The company has a good credit rating because score as its equity ratio is high.

Using the dictionary is easy and intuitive, but it is good to have these caveats in mind.

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