Tuesday Tools: Various Writing Helps
/We all could use a little help with writing and editing text. Here are some wonderful tools (apps and online) that will help in unexpected ways. You'll more writing tools at the tech tools site. If you have other suggestions, feel free to send them my way.
Associated Press Stylebook*
The most used reference guide to writing news stories, the AP stylebook is available both in print and online for a small fee. It can improve general writing as well, especially for its alphabetically organized guide to the use of common and proper nouns.
Diversity Style Guide
Resource to help media writers nagivate through a "multicultural world with accuracy, authority and sensitivity."
Cliche Finder
Just what the title suggests. Free.
Copyscape
Check for online plagiarism.
Corpus of Contemporary American English
This BYU site includes transcripts of spoken language from radio and television programs and comprises academic writing from a range of disciplines allowing comparison of styles--spoken language vs.written academic language.
Coschedule Headline Analyzer
Analyze your headlines for SEO and share value. Free.
Dragon Anywhere*
Voice to text app for iOS. Have to finish dictation before seeing the text. Free.
Flip Text
Flip text upside-down. Use it on Facebook or Twitter. Free.
Gender Guesser
Cut and paste some of your writing into the the Gender Guesser and it will tell you whether you are male or female based on the writing tendencies of each.
the Grading Game*
App for practicing your editing skills and win points. Avail at the App Store.
Grammar Girl
Writing Tips from a grammarian.
Hackpad
Edit, organize and share documents. Merged with Dropbox in 2014.
HubSpot's Blog Topic Generator
Just write three nouns related to the topic that you'd like to blog about and this site will offer ideas.
Lexicon Valley
Slate's grammar podcasts.
Limpert's About Editing and Writing Blog
A blog about how editors and writers do their work by Jack Limert was editor of the The Washingtonian for more than 40 years.
Medium
Created by Twitter co-founders to support good writing. Clean design and easy-to-use interface. For those who want to write but don’t want to maintain a blog or website. Intended to be a place where smart people plant their thoughts. Share a draft of a post with friends who can make comments as marginal notes (rather than at the end of a post). Free, but Twitter account is required. No custom domains or customization.
Online Etymology Dictionary
Gives you the history and derivation of any word. Free.
Overview
Developed at the Associated Press, Overview analyzes the complete text of every document, extracting keywords and sorting documents into categories and sub-categories.
Power Thesaurus
Crowdsourced thesaurus.
Rhymer
Free rhyming dictionary.
SEOmov
SEO writing tips.
Svbtle
Writing platform. Minimalist interface. Encourages reader response.
Sync.in
Collaborative writing tool.
TextExpander
Mac typing shortcut. Takes snippets of text and turns them into longer ones. Ideas for how to use it here. $44.95.
TextGrabber*
Extracts text from a variety of printed sources (PDF, books, etc.) by using the iPhone camera. Can translate text from many languages. $4.99.
Tone Analyzer
Linguistic analysis detects the emotional tone of your writing. Detect the levels of particular emotions it triggers and language style. Free.
Yoast SEO
A WordPress plugin to work SEO into your writing.