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Try these 5 free online tools to power up your writing - Ragan Communications. Here are five free online tools to make your writing better. 1. Hemingway Editor. Copy and paste a piece of your writing into this app, and it’ll identify overly complex sentences, passive writing and unnecessary adjectives. The result is writing that’s as lean and muscular as Hemingway’s famously punchy style. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Inspiring quotations on writing for content marketers. Readability | The Writer. Use our free readability checker and find out. Just copy and paste your writing into the box below and click the ‘check my readability’ button. We’ll check your writing against the Flesch-Kincaid reading ease score, the Gunning Fog score and the SMOG index (‘Simple Measure of Gobbledygook’). How readability checkers work They’re assessing the ‘reading age’ someone needs to be to understand your writing clearly on a first reading.

All readability formulas work by counting the variables that have the biggest impact on readers being able to ‘take in’ a bit of writing: sentence length, number of syllables per words, number of passive sentences. (They don’t check for spelling mistakes though.) Each formula works things out in a slightly different way. But remember, the score doesn’t tell you everything. For the rest of us, they’re a good rule of thumb as to whether your writing’s on track. Readability formulas can also only tell you how easy or hard your writing is to ‘take in’. SMOG index. 7 free writing resources | Articles | Main. Would you like your content to have fewer errors?

Wouldn’t it be great to type more quickly and accurately? Want to stay focused and minimize distractions? These free online resources can help you on your productivity journey: 1. Reduce mistakes with Grammarly. We all hate typos—especially the kind you catch after sending your latest creation out into the world. Grammarly can help you avoid that next embarrassing error. Billed as the “world’s leading online proofreader,” this is a must-have for content developers who are doing more work online, away from the shelter of Word’s spelling and grammar checkers.

Once you install Grammarly, it will monitor whatever you type in Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as well. 2. Corporate-speak, buzzwords and jargon have no place in great content. Like a thief in the night, jargon can sneak into sentences and render writing dull or confusing. You can experiment with a free version on the site, but a “basic” version is only $2.99. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. How to Create Content that Deeply Engages Your Audience. 'What the heck is that word?' These 5 resources can help. You're trying to think of a word, but it stubbornly refuses to materialize. Oh, well. You'll think of it—when it's too late. What do you do in the meantime? Plenty of books and websites are available to bridge the gap between your brain and the word it seeks. (Bowing to the convenience of the Web, however, few new word-finder books have been published in some time.) Here are summaries of five of these resources. 1. This book by language maven Theodore M.

You might find the effort worthwhile. For example, what's that word for when you elbow somebody in a crowd? 2. This online tool helps you find a word for which you know the definition but not the term itself, generate a list of related terms or concepts, or find the answers to simple factual questions. [RELATED: Grammar Girl's new AP Style course is perfect for journalists and PR pros.] 3. There are more than 850 pages of entries, each with dozens of terms categorized to an intricate level of detail. 4. That's only the starting point. 5. Ten rules for writing fiction. Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin 1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a charac­ter's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look­ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want. 2 Avoid prologues: they can be ­annoying, especially a prologue ­following an introduction that comes after a foreword. 3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. 4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" ... he admonished gravely. 5 Keep your exclamation points ­under control. 6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". 7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. 8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. 10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Diana Athill Margaret Atwood Roddy Doyle.