I’ve done a little php programming and might make the tool myself since I don’t think it’d be that hard, but it sure would be nice if I could find one (that I could trust – your manuscript would be beyond your control).
Basically, it’d work like this:
- Go to: h-t-t-p-://<sitename.com>
- click the upload your manuscript button
- choose “find homophones”
- click “do it”
What follows would be your manuscript, rendered in html, scrolling past and stopping at each homophone it finds and then waiting for you to click “next.” Then you could look up the different meanings, if needed.
Homophone finder would stop at words like:
- its / it’s
- their / there / they’re
- councilors / counselors
- peak / peek
- rite / write
- new / knew
- etc / etc
There’s nothing more embarrassing than firing off a manuscript you’ve read 300 times and discovering one of these horrors after the fact.
A tool like this would be fairly easy to make. All it would need is:
- a php library to read word docs
- a text file of homophones (lots of them out there)
- a web server to take input/output
Not sure if anyone else would find something like this useful or not, or just me. If anyone knows of such a tool, I’m not above reading comments 🙂
John L. Monk 