In our hyper-digitalized world, writing original content is a serious challenge. We’ve seen everything – amuse us if you can. Readers are more demanding today, but let’s face it: writers don’t use just pen and paper. There’s a wide range of tools that help you create content, be it a technical blog post or a fantasy story.
And while we have a number of tools to help us write, the challenges authors face are still multiple. Writer’s block, fear of the blank page, self-doubt, low pay – writers have always struggled with these issues. On top of it all, modern writers suffer from fierce competition. According to Statista, in 2018, there were over 45.2 thousand writers and authors working in the United States. Originality is another concern: whether you write a thesis or a thriller, you need a fresh idea or a brand-new way to present an old one. Fortunately, these seven go-to apps are out there for writers.
Top Tools For Writers
It’s a handy tool for writers, students, translators, or journalists geared toward longer projects. Scrivener helps authors organize parts of their research, text excerpts, notes, and references into one neat document with easily accessible sections. With this tool, you can start writing from chapter 3, hop to the final scene, add juicy details to the part you wrote yesterday, and then jump back to the beginning. Split your text in a convenient way, write whatever comes into your head at the moment – and patch pieces together with simple drag-and-drop.
This service helps you weed out sentence bloat, redundant adverbs, and overly complicated words. Hemingway will analyze your text and highlight places where you can tighten your writing or split super-long sentences into easy-to-read chunks. It also scores your text for readability. This tool will be a good find for anyone writing for the general public.
Unicheck is a valuable tool for academic writing. It checks texts for plagiarism and cheating, verifies authorship, and corrects erroneous quotations. This plagiarism checker for writers comes with Emma, an AI-based authorship verification assistant. Feed several texts by one author to Emma, and it will verify authorship by analyzing the author’s writing style. A life-saver for teachers checking dozens of texts for plagiarism, Unicheck promotes high-quality writing and careful referencing. It is essential for any writer to check references and quotations in his or her text and eliminate the possibility of authorship violation.
Thesaurus is an essential tool for writers helping them replace overused words like “main,” “good,” “great,” and other catch-alls in their texts with fresh alternatives. It also provides definitions and antonyms to the terms typed in the search field. Fun words and writing prompts come as a bonus.
Ideas love to come to you when you’re on a treadmill at the gym, or in a supermarket queue when you have nothing at hand to catch them. It’s not that comfortable to jot your ideas down in your smartphone, so Dragon makes voice notes – with 99% recognition accuracy. A cloud-based mobile solution, Dragon has no word limit, allows you to format, edit and share texts, synchronizes with the desktop version, and works both on Android and iOS.
Even top professionals make typos or stylistic slips. Grammarly is the perfect tool to check your writing for grammar, punctuation, and style. After spending a long time writing, you can easily miss poor phrasing or repetitions in your text, as it becomes all too familiar. Choose your target audience, level of formality, and tone – and this app will suggest phrasing that will be a good match.
Writing fiction, you want to omit overused phrases and give your text a fresh twist. Cliche Finder is a free tool that identifies cliches overrunning your writing. Journalists, translators, and fiction writers should fight cliches with all their might. The Cliche Finder app is a powerful weapon for this.
Any Cons In Using Tech For Writing?
Writing tools do have some drawbacks. To get on board of Scrivener, you have to study a lengthy tutorial – the app is feature-heavy. Another con – it works better in macOS and lacks some functions in Windows. A thesaurus might be a no-no for authors who argue that writing should flow naturally from the creative subconscious, and looking up words is off-limits. Tools scoring readability can be harmful since they evaluate your text according to formal requirements, thereby dumping individual style down the drain. Grammarly sometimes overlooks mistakes or tends to overcorrect highlighting every single use of passive voice, for instance.
The Bottom Line
There’s no silver bullet – your best bet would be to strike a balance between using tech and relying on your sense of style. Writing is still a human prerogative, and it will be years before AI can come even close to what contemporary authors create. All you could do to win your reader is to write your guts out, watch your grammar, use a plagiarism checker – and impress today’s pampered audience with your style and originality.
