Writers are a wonderful gift to the online experience. They exist in all industries, constantly pounding out relevant and engaging content that readers gobble up. While writers are fantastic, though, they are not unique. This assertion shows by the fact that there is so much written content online and counting.
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5 Essential Online Writing Tools
But while there is a lot of content online, there is a loophole worth exploring: not all content is good enough. A lot of content online is subpar, unengaging, ridden with errors, lacking structure and flow, and much more.
So how do you make your content stand out from this swirling sea of content? How do you situate your writing among the best resources a reader can have?
When it comes to content creation, the devil is in the details. Great content usually isn’t about coming up with some novel idea or perspective; it’s about paying attention to the finer — and often mundane aspects of the writing process. But even that is often difficult to do — at least not without some help.
We’ve rounded up a list of five excellent online writing tools that will help to clean up and improve your writing while boosting your speed and productivity. These writing tools make sense for novelists, professional writers, freelance writers, content marketers, and every other content-related responsibility.
Grammarly:
No list of essential online writing tools would be complete without Grammarly. This tool is one of the most effective quality assurance article writer tools for authors, article writers, professional writers, and every other kind of writer.
The ironic thing about quality writing tools like Grammarly is that their benefit is only apparent when you do not use them. Readers are not particularly hyped about a piece of content because it’s free of grammar and spelling errors, but they will tear it down if those errors exist.
These avoidable errors can quickly discredit your writing and make it unreliable in the eyes of netizens everywhere. This is why using Grammarly is a no-brainer, especially since we can’t always catch these errors on our own.
Grammarly has a free plan and a premium plan. To use the free version, all you need to do is download and install the free browser extension. This will enable Grammarly for anywhere you write online from Google Docs to social media platforms and more.
Grammarly will work on your content for sentence structure, clarity, engagement, errors, overall readability, and even plagiarism.
Hemingway Editor
This editor is perfect for creating content in the standard online mold. It does have a lot of similarities but is a little more strict in its writing suggestions. If you’re working on a piece of content that is for a broad audience, Hemingway Editor is a good bet.
This is because this free tool helps to eliminate jargon and any niche-specific language in favor of simple wording that any average writer can comprehend. Hemingway will help you shorten long sentences, reduce large paragraphs, check for passive word and phrase choices, excessive adverb use, restructure difficult-to-read sentences, and more.
Readers will be able to get the gist of your content, whether they do an in-depth read or scan through the article. Remember to use your discretion while using this editor as its unbiased operation may not be the best for every kind of online content.
StayFocusd
One significant difference between writing on paper and a digital internet-enabled device is that the latter has a lot more distractions to contend with. Maybe you decided to take your eyes off your writing for one second to do some fact-checking for your content, only to spend the next three hours on Pinterest.
StayFocusd helps you to take back your concentration. It comes as a Google Chrome browser extension. With this online writing tool, you can disable web browsing altogether or pick and choose specific websites and pages to allow or deny access. ]
You can also customize it to block access according to the content type, like videos, social media posts, music, video games, and more. With all these distractions out of the way, you will be able to focus on your writing again.
One Look Reverse Dictionary
While effective writing should be as simple as possible to aid easy comprehension, writers still need to have a fairly extensive vocabulary. Using a particular word choice repeatedly when writing is a proven way to lose your readers quickly. You do not always want to use the phrase “online users” to describe people that use the internet. But sometimes, synonyms are hard to come by.
With One Look Reverse Dictionary, you can have instant access to all the possible synonym definitions of any word — and it searches them by definition too.
One Look is essentially the new and improved Thesaurus. With the latter, you’ll probably get one synonym suggestion, maybe “web surfers.” Still, with a simple synonym search using One Look, you’ll receive as many returned possibilities as there are on the internet: web visitor, internet user, internet surfer, netizen, internaut, and much more.
Cliché Finder
Not all clichés are equal. However, even loftier ones can quickly become redundant. Experienced writers know that clichés are little more than a matter of style and should not be overused. They make your writing seem evasive. Your content will look as if you’re using these common phrases to hide the fact that you have nothing to write about.
What Cliché Finder helps you to do is identify these ambiguous and overused phrases and replace them with more original copy specific to your content topic. Just put your content in this tool’s text field, and it will reveal all the clichés used. You can then replace them according to your discretion.
The Most Dangerous Writing App
This app means precisely the way its name sounds — it is dangerous to use. This online writing tool does two crucial things for any writer: it shreds your procrastination and kills your inclination for real-time editing. It does these two things by threatening to delete your content.
How does the app work? The Most Dangerous Writing App will not let you save your content until you reach a predetermined writing limit — usually from three minutes to an hour. If you stop writing before your time limit long enough to check on the progress you’ve made so far, the app will swiftly delete everything you’ve written.
Sounds dangerous? That’s precisely the point. It is the biggest motivator on this list to get all your ideas on paper first before going back to work on the structure, grammar, flow, and all the other stuff. The Most Dangerous Writing App is undoubtedly not for the faint of heart but will help to gamify your writing while pushing you towards your writing goal.
Final Thoughts
This list is by no means exhaustive. There are so many other tools you can use to check your content for grammar and spelling, boost your productivity, eliminate distractions, collaborate with other writers, and more.
You will be setting yourself up for success from the get-go if you rely on these online writing tools to get your content from idea to publishing — unless, of course, writing success is not something that you’re interested in.
- 5 Essential Online Writing Tools You Should Start To Use - May 13, 2020