Bullfighter for writing

Matthew Stibbe's review of the Bullfighter add-on for Word and PowerPoint intrigued me enough to try it. It's a quick and easy install that adds a toolbar to the applications.

I decided to test it against my most recent doc, What's New in Data Protection Manager SP1. (If you're participating in the SP1 beta, you can download it from the Connect website.) I clicked Bull Index on the toolbar and got my results:

"Bull Index: 91
Diagnosis: Congratulations - you rely upon standard words to explain concepts. Most concepts will be clear and understood. Keep clean."

(Bullfighter dinged me for "Knowledge Base", but since I was referring to articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, I couldn't very well not use the words.)

The Flesch score wasn't as good, only a 38:

"Diagnosis: Teetering on the edge of unclear. The overall meaning remains discernible, but it becomes possible to lose oneself in corollary thoughts, which may be worth exploration, but which can also detract from the core point of the written article."

Bullfighter's diagnosis there seems to be trying to teach through nonexample!

Next time I'll try it against more complicated documents and see if it's helpful.