If you lack confidence in your writing skills, WhiteSmoke General Writing 2009 may prove to be a boon. And General Writing stays just the right side of overpriced. But as with all such tools, caveats apply — don't rely on WhiteSmoke alone to make sure your copy is pristine.

As a comfort blanket for checking documents before you send them on, WhiteSmoke 2008+ Executive offers more than MS Word. It's full-featured and easy to use and picks up basic mistakes. But WhiteSmoke suffers from problems intrinsic to all automatic editors; without a human to make judgements, it will never be infallible. At $136.99 WhiteSmoke 2008+ Executive seems a little expensive to us, but the $79 General Writing version may suite your needs just as well.

It's free, available anywhere and it's quick in use, but Ajax13's ajaxWrite leaves a lot to be desired.

The trade-off for Jarte's small footprint and shallow learning curve is a dearth of features. A paid-for version, Jarte Plus, offers more, such as automatic spelling correction, automatic outlines, the ability to save clipboard cuttings for future use and support for independent user profiles, which Jarte calls "personalities".