Phiction Phreak

Phiction Phreak is a user-friendly and quite simple to handle piece of software which aims to offer you the means of quickly identifying the best wording for your texts, be they fiction or otherwise, providing you with access to commonly used expressions and phrases that you can browse through and use in your literary work.

Appearance-wise, the application is quite basic and unimpressive, but manages to do its job without a problem, being accessible to the less computer savvy.

It features an adjustable window where you can load and examine the database or perform searches, by entering keywords in the dedicated text field.

Phiction Phreak provides you with a database of over twenty thousand expressions and words, allowing you to browse through them, letting you freely include in your work any that might catch your literary eye.

To look at random words and phrases, you can click on ‘Examine Database’ and all of the available entries will be listed in the main window, in alphabetic order, enabling you to scroll through them; clicking on a term will immediately display all the phrases it is used in. Bear in mind, however, that the size of the database may also influence the utility’s response speed.

Moreover, you can view the ‘Common Searches’, an extensive list of the keyword terms and their frequency. At the same time, you are able to perform your own searches by entering the word you may be having trouble with, the program retrieving the expressions where it has been used in.

However, Phiction Phreak does not offer the possibility of enriching the database with your own terms, phrases or expressions, which you may come across in your reading, only allowing you to work with the regularly updated built-in database.

In closing, Phiction Phreak is a practical and useful tool which aims to help you write fiction more easily by giving you access to numerous phrases and expressions to use in your work, its one disadvantage being perhaps the fact that you have no option of adding items to the database yourself.