1. Grammarly – Given the limits of its human programmers, its artificial intelligence isn’t perfect, but among editing apps, it’s still fairly accurate. You get to decide whether to accept its suggestions. The free version checks for errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. The paid version does more detailed diagnoses, including scanning for clichés and the passive voice. It also has a plagiarism checker.
2. The Hemingway App – I can’t rave enough about it. Even with years of writing experience, once I started using it, the quality of my work improved greatly. It doesn’t just determine the reading level, it also highlights long sentences, adverbs, “big” words, misspellings, and the passive voice. But you need to figure out the editing yourself. 🙂 The desktop version is free and you can use the mobile app for a fee.
3. Word Hippo – None other than Ann Handley has anointed it, which makes it gospel — it’s a “must use” to prompt the writing muse. 🙂 This literary “Swiss Army” knife offers everything from a thesaurus to a rhyming dictionary and a word finder. Use it as a desktop or a smartphone app.
4. Word Counter – This web-based app lives up to its name and then some. It also offers grammar and spell-check, a thesaurus, and advice on case style and SEO keyword density. “Auto-save” is another helpful feature. And it tells you how long it takes to read your writing.
5. Cliché Finder – Another one of the “bare bones” editing apps born in the web’s infancy, it spots commonly used words and phrases, which appear in bold red text. It doesn’t suggest alternatives, so you need to do the work yourself. Creating your own similes and metaphors can guide you toward more inspired phrasing.
Apps can’t always catch every mistake. Having someone look over your content and revise it for you can ensure your copy is error-free. Contact me.
Which apps do you use to edit your writing? Feel free to comment below.
Quotes
“I did a couple of writing seminars in Canada with high school kids. These were the bright kids; they all have computers, but they can’t spell. Because spell-check won’t [help] you if you don’t know ‘through’ from ‘threw.’ I told them, ‘If you can read in the 21st century, you own the world.’ Because you learn to write from reading.” ~ Stephen King
“Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
Comments? Suggestions? Need help with your communications? Contact me.
