Cleartext For Mac

The "Things Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words" book by Randall Munroe proposes a quite interesting concept: complex things can be made clear with the help of drawings and very simple words.

Cleartext is a minimalist OS X app designed to help you write text in this manner: you get to employ only the 1000 most common words in the English language.

The Cleartext interface is resumed to a single resizable window where you get to type the text. The text seems to be centered as you start the typing process but seems to lose this quality in time.

Moreover, even though you save the document, after a while, the Cleartext text seems to include everything you have typed in the window, even though you have removed certain sections, or corrected the mistakes.

As a result, it is advisable to use the OS X clipboard to copy the text to a third party editor as soon as you finish working on it. In this case, the Cleartext text will preserve its formatting outside the app without any problems.

Within the Cleartext main window, you get to use only the 1000 most common words in the English language, which means that you will have to refine your ideas until only the essential information is preserved.

However, this might put you in some impossible situations, especially if you need to include numbers or other quantitative information. By default Cleartext will remove the unauthorized words, but you can disable this functionality and opt only for the audio notifications.

To conclude, Cleartext enables you to increase the clarity of your writing by employing only common English words that will be understood by virtually anyone. The utility can automatically remove the unapproved words, but you can also bypass this limitation if you have no alternative expressions.