Today I am going to help you become a better writer. Well, maybe not become a better writer, but seem to be a better writer by making fewer mistakes by plowing your way through writing roadblocks by hook or by crook or by using the best tools available to help you compose more effectively. I should have used some for my preamble. Let’s start by just talking about simple basic writing.
I increasingly just use Google drive as my word processor. Why do I use Google Drive? Because it’s online and almost all of my writing now happens online. But occasionally, I need a little bit of help. Now I have talked in the past about “Grammarly” which is my grammar checking editor and I’ll talk about that again at the very end. It’s a tool that helps me with my process of writing. But when I actually just write in Google Docs or in Google Drive—I’m still used to calling it Google Docs—when I’m on Google Drive—I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s getting older
—I still sometimes confuse words. If you look for a list of commonly confused words on the internet I confuse almost all of those words all the time and every time.
I confuse a word. I have to sit there and think which word I’m supposed to be using. For example, here at the very beginning of this text one of the words I have trouble with is “effect.” Is it “effect” or “affect?” I know the difference.
Right now as I’m speaking to you I absolutely know the difference, but does that mean that minutes from now when I’m writing, I’m in the middle of writing that I will know the difference? No. For some reason I forget. So within Google Drive a lot of us just right-click on the word and look you can define the word. You can bring up a little definition in and up comes Google Research which tells you a description of the word. That is awesome. You should use this a lot. If you’re experiencing a little bit of writer’s block or some issues around things you want to use a different word down in the bottom of each time they do a definition they will give you synonyms so you can come up with maybe a different word that works better especially if you’re using the same word over and over again.
So tip #1 for better writing right-click your mouse on the word especially if you’re in Google Docs and use the resources that are available to you.
Tip #2 this one I really like for a whole variety of reasons. It’s a simple little web service called Word Counter and all they do—I’ve just copied some text of an article—is you ask it to go through and how often I am using this word or these words. You can see if you’re using one word too repetitively within the document which again allows you to go back in that if you realize that you’re using a word too often. If you’re writing for the web and you want to write SEO search engine optimization-friendly content and there are certain keywords that you want in that document to help Google find that document as it’s searching, you can use this as well to make sure that you’ve got a number of instances of your keywords within a document as you search it. That is a hidden benefit in this little tool called Word Counter.
Now the next tool I like just because it’s got the best title of any product that I’ve ever seen – Write or Die by Dr. Wicked. This is a word processor and it’s available in a desktop version but the online one works great. It cost like 20$ to buy the full version, but what it does. start it playing so you can see how it works as you’re writing it plays back nice sounds. It does all sorts of nice things for you.
So if I’m writing along and I’m saying “It’s talking to me very nastily and I should be writing” now if I stop and I get writer’s block and I stop writing for a few seconds it starts to go kind of psycho on you. You’ve got different ways of having it kick in. it’s turning red. It’s getting angry. I just turn up my speakers. It starts playing like horror music unless I start writing.
Okay, I give. It gets you kind of writing again. I don’t know if it's conducive to the best prose being written—I’ve got to pause it or it’s going to get angry again—but when it’s happy it’ll give you nice—okay peanut butter and jelly time.
When it’s happy, you can have it doing things like having cats purr at you and give you nice backgrounds and all sorts of things. But when it’s angry when you’re not writing it gets irritating sometimes horrifically so. So Write or Die if you do experience writer’s block if you do need that little extra impetus to get through everything as you’re doing it.It is a tool that you might consider.
Now I mentioned that I used Google Drive as my main processor. My favorite word processor of all one from a small company in England called Literature and Latte and the product is called Scrivener. It is a word processor. I’ll turn down the volume. I don’t have it installed on this particular computer right now, but I leave this as a word processor because if you are a scriptwriter if you are a student and you’re working on documents where you need lots organization and structure to it, Scrivener allows you to create kind of building blocks of whatever work you’re working on. So if you’re writing a script, it’s great. You can have a dialogue. You can have characters. You can have all things.
If you’re a student and you’re writing a paper you can be taking notes, putting them all on the little index cards and then assemble them later on into a word processed form. I don’t know if I’ve done justice to it in the explanation of it right now. It’s a fairly inexpensive word processor. I think it’s like 39$ or 40$ to purchase but as far as I’m concerned for structured writing where you’re doing a lot of research and you’re doing a lot of massaging of the content, not for blog writing the sort of writing that I do nowadays where it’s just words and I’m done. But if you’re writing papers if you’re writing scripts if you’re writing a book this would be the tool that I would choose without any question. Scrivener – it’s a word processor, which I think the world of.
And finally, if you do the sort of writing that I do and that we all do now we do Tweets, we do status updates, and we do short little -word blog posts and incredibly long -word blog posts one of the things that suffers as a result is craftsmanship. Because I’m writing to short length I don’t pay as much attention to accuracy especially around spelling punctuation in the short little posts. Consequently, I end up sometimes looking a little bit less intelligent than I should because I post things before they’re ready to be posted with mistakes on them. So I purchased Grammarly which is software that you buy online and it basically does online grammar and spell checking for you. Now it’s not very expensive.
It’s $139.95 or so for a year I think is what I paid for it. But what it’s done for me is it’s changed my process.Because I purchased this I actually go into it and every time I’m posting anything at all, I just check it very quickly and it goes through and it does the grammar checking and spell checking. It also as a bonus does plagiarism checking which is awesome. Maybe you’ve been making notes, maybe you’ve been clipping things off of the internet and you’ve accidentally incorporated them into your document what somebody else is writing without you knowing about it, it will actually tell you if it’s found it somewhere else if it’s found those phrases somewhere else online so that you can pay attention and either credit the original author or rewrite it so that you don’t actually plagiarize somebody.
For people who do plagiarize if you’re hiring somebody to do the writing for you, it’s a great way for you to check to make sure that they haven’t posted that somewhere else online as well. So it’s got some of those nice things going for it. But for me, kind of rolling back the benefit is it does catch the odd grammar mistake that I make and allows me to look at it. It does catch the odd spelling mistake, but what it really does is by the fact that it comes up with a few suggestions is it makes me stop and reread my work once before I publish it and I found that I’m catching far more errors and my written communication is that much more clear and that much less embarrassing as a result.
So that is my fifth and last tool that we’re going to talk about today Grammarly. Right-click your mouse on words, especially if you’re in a word processor like Google Drive and you can check the accuracy of the words you can check if it’s being used properly and you can find synonyms; you can count your words overall in your document for search engine optimization or to make sure you’re not being overly repetitive.
If you have writer’s block Write or Die which is a fairly dire situation;
Literature and Latte’s Scrivener, which I think is the outstanding word processor on the planet today; and finally Grammarly which will help you change your process, especially for short online posts and make sure that you make less mistakes when you post online that way. I hope you found this article to be useful. I know that I think all of these tips I use on a fairly regular—I don’t use Write or Die yet but I might start using Write or Die. That would be fun.