By. Terry Wilhite

Whether making melody and rhyme is your pursuit or not, let me tell you about a tool that I’m convinced will benefit you. The software is called MasterWriter, a suite of writing tools that is picking up “rants and raves” at every turn. While it’s touted as “the ultimate collection of writing tools for the professional songwriter”, I believe you’ll quickly agree with me, it can be the “pair of pliers” in your communications toolbox. First off, let me get your attention by saying that it has the only alliterations dictionary in existence. So when the first two alliterated points of your message have easily come to mind but you’re wracking your brain to try to convert the third idea into an alliterative equivalent, never fear MasterWriter is here. Click on “alliterations” on the toolbar at the top of the software’s interface, press return on your computer keyboard and “presto” all the alliterative choices are at your disposal. Which reminds me, the software is extremely paradoxical. It is just so easy to use, yet it is astonishingly powerful and brilliantly designed. Let me tell you how easy it really is to use.

The Interface
Along the top tool bar of this software, you’ll find buttons to click, representing: songs, rhymes, rhyme-phrases, phrases, alliterations, pop-culture, dictionary, thesaurus, and notebook. A search field is available that allows you to type in the word that you’d like to explore. For example, click on “rhyme” and then type in the words “old man”. You’ll get all the words that rhyme with “old man”. More than 100,000 entries are included in the rhyming dictionary. So having searched “old man”, you get rhymes such as “Tarzan”, “afghan”, “Batman” and “bedpan”. If you want to hone your search, in the toolbar, simply change the syllables you desire from “all” to the number of syllables you need, and there you have it, your rhyme choices are honed down to the beat. Once you type your search word into the interface, you then only have to click on the main categories (rhyme-phrases, phrases, alliterations, etc.) to have the software help you in the category you selected.

Are you relevant?
By learning the language of the culture, often doors can be opened that can be opened no other way. The correct use of slang, for instance, leads to instant camaraderie. MasterWriter has a pop-culture dictionary that contains over 33,000 phrases, idioms, clichés, sayings and word combinations. Once you click on “Pop Culture” in the toolbar, you’ll see four major categories: the world, famous names, famous products, food, drink and travel. Each of those categories has subcategories. For example, when you click on “Food, Drink and Travel” and choose “food” you get lists of taste bud tantalizers: from A-1 Sauce to Cracklin’ Oat Bran, Dole Fruit Juice and so forth through the alphabet of food choices. For the songwriter, MasterWriter is just what the doctor ordered to trigger the songwriter’s brain with a message that strikes a chord in the listener’s ears. For the sermon writer, it can provide the same creative jolt. You just never know when you’ll need a handy dandy list of newsmakers, sports teams, or just the right alliterative word. MasterWriter provides you with more than 11,000 icons of American and World culture.

In addition to a rhyming and pop culture dictionary, this software goes where no traditional resource has gone before, not to mention a digital one. MasterWriter provides you more than 36,000 rhymed-phrases in an easy-to-use dictionary. For example, type into the search field the word “ocean” and you get such phrases as “a complex emotion”, “ a crazy notion”, “battlefield promotion” and a “eternal devotion”. There’s no need to re-type “ocean”. Just click over to the dictionary tab and you’ll see that the ocean is “the entire body of salt water that covers more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface.” (The American Heritage Dictionary and Roget’s II Thesaurus are included.) Click over to the “rhymes” tab on the toolbar and get these words, among many: “potion, notion, Laotian”.

The creators of MasterWriter have deliberately removed offensive words and phrases from the database, although they didn’t take such liberty with the copyrighted dictionary and thesaurus. It took the creators more than seven years to build and categorize their database one word and phrase at the time.

For the musician
Musicians will be interested to know that the software includes a simple, yet effective hard disk recorder for recording your tunes that you sing or play via a microphone or synthesizer that can be connected to your computer. MasterWriter includes a full function word processor and it’s Mac OS and Windows compatible. See www.masterwriter.com.