3 Must-Have Online Writing Tools You Want in Your Life
Meet my 3 best friends
With all life’s curveballs, we can use all the help we can get. So, when you dream of building a house, you use a trusted hammer. So, if you aspire to be a clothing designer, you had better invest in a sewing machine.
Now, when you decide that your passion is to write, you must line up your writing tools and keep them in your back pocket, otherwise known as ‘bookmarked’, at all times.
Some people believe that fresh writing needs to reinvent the wheel every time. But, even when words come from the heart, there is no reason not to take all the help you can get (how’s my double negative?).
Let’s be clear. Using writing tools doesn’t distract from your craft. Rather, the tools elevate your writing. Think of sea salt in chocolate. One might have thought the salt would only distract from the dark, smooth delicacy. We all know otherwise.
3 essential writing tools that never let me down
Let me introduce my 3 most-trustworthy writing tools that I use every single day. To be fair, I actually use 5 writing tools every day, but I figured most of you have heard of a dictionary and a thesaurus.
1. Collocations Dictionary
This is potentially the most undiscovered online writing tool out there. It is so under the radar, that I needed to do a Masters of Linguistics to get in on this action (true tale).
So, what is a collocation anyway? Collocations are combinations of words that are frequently used together. And 14 billion words have been fed into and stored in a database to analyze collocations. This is a part of corpus linguistics, which is a snapshot of how language is used in the real world.
2. Headline Studio
…is a free online tool that analyzes your headline into four categories of words: common, uncommon, emotional and power words. It gives you a further breakdown of readability, keywords, headline length, headline type and the sentiment of your headline.
I consistently use Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer because it lets me know when my titles are bland and when my titles are compelling enough. You really start to get a good sense of certain buzzwords and what impression they leave on people. There’s even a PDF you can download with a list of buzzworthy words.
3. Grammarly
Yes, even professional writers and linguists make mistakes and need suggestions. Grammarly uses AI and collocation-based linguistics to make suggestions and corrections. In my experience, you still need a human brain to make the final decision, since Grammarly is known to provide awkward or unnecessary suggestions.
For example, early in this article, I used the expression “my 3 most trust-worthy writing tools” and Grammarly is clearly not happy. It would like me to change “my” with “the” which is not incorrect. But, the semantics of “my 3 most trust-worth writing tools” is directly on par with my intended meaning and I will NOT give in to the Grammarly grammar God.
And….you’re welcome. I have also tried out the paid subscription option and I am happy to report that I didn’t find the added features with the paid account very useful. You can feel confident that you are getting a lot with the free version without the need to upgrade.
Here we have it. MY 3 most trust-worthy writing tools. They are not only more reliable than most people I know, but they always put me in a good mood. Let me know if you try them out.
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