Behold the Passivator

Thanks to the latest column by Chip Scanlan at Poynter, I have discovered a neat writing tool around for about a year: The Passivator by Paul Ford (with the help of Gina Trapani) -- a piece of Javascript that seeks out and highlights every "to be" verb and "-ly": adverb on a Web page. As Ford notes, no substitute for a knowledge of grammar, but a big help in pointing out potential problems.

Great for checking out your blog postings, though it won't work with the posting windows in many cases, so you'll have to go into preview mode (if your software has it), then check.

Now if one just existed for Word. I haven't found one; anyone know differently? Maybe someone with Visual Basic knowledge could write one.