Ouch. I like to think that I have a competent grasp of my native language, even though I don’t claim to be a virtuoso performer. I’m not a writer, as such. Well, I’m a writer in that part of my work involves writing for a guitar magazine, but I’m not a Writer. Nonetheless, I like to poke fun at bad spelling and grammar in commercial and civic publications and I can do the smug, ironic little chuckle at the famous split infinitive at the start of Star Trek. What’s more, I harbour a secret yearning for the day when I’ll pluck up the courage to walk up to an ice cream van and, with the full benefit of the classical education I never had, ask for “Two Magna, please”.
So, anyway… the point. Paul Ford’s Passivator is a very amusing little tool (compatible with Safari, Opera and Mozilla browsers; if you’re using IE, you need a new browser anyway) which highlights adverbs and passive verbs in a piece of text. Drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar and click it whenever an overly adverb-laded or suspiciously insufficiently active piece of text is loaded into your browser…