Thanks for trying Lexicon. You might like to know that you can add any terms you want (like “law” or “shall”) directly to the glossary rather than artificially inserting them in your document. Just click the Edit Glossary button or check the help file for instructions.

- Steve Gullion, Lexicon Tools

I tried it. It seems kinda handy. I ran two form agreements through it and it found a few drafting busts. None were terribly significant in the sense that I could see litigation coming from them, but you never know.

More interestingly, it let me compare instances where I used the same word with different meanings and also in a defined sense. I had previously eliminated the defined term “Law” but had not killed off all its uses in text. Lexicon searched for instances of “Law” and also showed up all its non-capitalized forms — “law,” “the law,” “any law,” and “laws.” All of these have different meanings, but I found one where I had said “any law” when I meant “law” and another where I had said “laws” when I mean “law.” To check all of these contrary meanings in the future, all I would have to do is type “Law” somewhere in the document (say, at the end) and it would show all of those uses for me and I could check for consistency.

I am thinking that, if I come up with a init-capitalized list of words that I always want to check for consistency, I could just paste it into the end of the document and then run Lexicon against it. For those that use the word “shall,” that might oughta be at the top of the list.

Chris