All good writers have identified one or two writing and proofreading tools that are a must use when writing articles.

These tools have the sole purpose of enhancing the flow of the articles while minimizing on the grammatical and spelling mistakes. Great articles don’t come easy! It takes a lot of refining, and these tools have been made available to help writers with the process.

In the past, writers had to use the dictionary and other learning materials, which involved a tedious perusal through books. However, thanks to the revolution experienced in technology and the introduction of the internet, the process has become easy. The writing and proofreading tools are available online.

The path to becoming an excellent author involves quite a rigorous journey that will take a lot of learning. (Well, by being here right now indicates that you’re on your way to attaining success. You are ready and willing to learn more – Hooray!). The desire and passion that drives you to become an excellent writer will lead you to hone your individual skills, combine that with the available tools and you have yourself some great material for reading.

So just how exactly do we propose you best use writing and proofreading tools?

Identify What Works Best for You

The number of writing and proofreading tools available on online platforms is quite huge. Definitely, you can’t use them all – It will totally backfire on you! Instead, identify which particular tools work well for you, and which ones offer what you deem as an excellent fit for your writing. Different people prefer different tools. Therefore, be sure to get what works for you.

An excellent writer understands what weaknesses they have and gets a tool that will check on that. Remember that these tools offer a range of services. All that’s needed is to pick the right services for you, and you get your preferred tool.

Simple Is Better

The most common mistake we all make is going for complicated stuff. (In this case, complex is relative). Simple is what you find comfortable and efficient to use. Remember that as a writer, time is a valuable commodity that you can’t afford to waste. Using complex tools can be quite time-consuming for you, as you often trying to figure how to use your chosen tool.

If you choose simplicity, then you’ll be saving yourself some time and able to do more. Simplicity allows a writer to explore all the ins and outs of the tool. It will be easy to maneuver using your preferred tool, and you’ll end up benefiting more from it.

Be Knowledgeable

Excellent writers have mastery of language. As a writer, it’s important that you have a grasp of the language you intend to communicate with. It’s all about being able to use the right words, at the right time, and with the right flow. We do recommend taking the time to understand your language of communication. Understand the grammar, the tone, spelling, tenses among others. You can also get further help from existing online platforms that you have identified to be good in language and writing.

However, most writers have become so lazy and didn’t take the time to master the language. What they do is use the tools. We warn you against making this very grievous mistake. The tools shouldn’t be a shortcut but rather helpers to enhance the quality of your work. These tools are not 100% accurate and individual language skills are what help in such instances.

Exercise Caution When Identifying Your Preferred Tool

Sadly, a majority of the tools are not as perfect. This implies they have flaws that could end up distorting your article. Before settling on a particular set of writing tools, ensure that you’ve thoroughly put them to the test. At times, the tools fail to identify errors or they identify mistakes where there are none. So, don’t just settle for anything, go for the best! Going for any tool might just ruin your writing. To avoid such a scenario, it will be best to have multiple sources of information to avoid over-reliance on one tool which could be wrong at other times.

Get the Right Tool for the Job

Writing and proofreading tools are perfect at performing particular tasks assigned to them. No one tool can perform all tasks. A real author learns to identify the best tool that works best at completing a specific task. Different authors have a preference for certain tools to perform certain tasks. We have highlighted a few examples:

1. Microsoft Word:

This is among essential tools that every single writer must be preview too. Word works well with almost every single tablet or PC. The first steps to becoming computer literate involve learning how to use Microsoft Word. Word is rated among the best and simple to use writing tool. With Word, you can work on your document offline and publish it later. It’s straight forward and easy to use, you get to save the progress on your work, and it highlights mistakes made, giving a writer the opportunity to make the necessary corrections. If you are new to writing, the Word is your go-to tool.

2. Windows Live Writer:

Windows Live Writer is a Windows program that comes installed on your laptop. It’s also easy to use the tool. All that will be required of you are the logins to your WordPress blog, and you will be good to go. It’s free to use.

Some of the perks that come with using Windows Live Writer includes the fact that it creates a backup copy of your articles, it gives you the freedom to use your preferred theme, you get to choose from an unlimited number of fonts as long as you have them downloaded to your computer, and it performs spell checks and make creating posts a bit easy.

3. Evernote or NotePad:

Notepad is a tool that is easy to use for writers especially when jotting down ideas. It’s viewed as an invaluable tool in the writing process. Using notepad is not that complicated. Once you have opened notepad on your PC all, you’ll have to do is type your ideas. Save the .txt file and retrieve it whenever you need to have a look at the ideas. What’s more is that should you save the .txt file to Google drive you can access it anywhere anytime.

Evernote isn’t so much different from notepad but works in the similar ways as notepad. It’s up to you the writer to select the one that appeals to you and your writing.

4. Grammarly

Grammarly is one of the most commonly used resources for writers today. Using Grammarly is easy and fun, in particular, the premium services although, you must have an online connection. Though it can still work offline, the range of services offered will be limited. With Grammarly, you can get the following services; the Logical flow of sentences, spelling and grammar check, language and plagiarism checks, and proofreading just to mention a few among other services.

Depending on the kind of service you require, Grammarly offers a variety of packages you can select from. The primary distinction is with free and premium Grammarly. Free Grammarly provides basic services such as grammar and spell check including placement of punctuation marks. Free means all you need to do is download and install it on your PC, and you are good to go. No fees charged.

On the other hand, premium Grammarly services are obtained on payment of set fees, payable either monthly or annually depending on what you find suitable for you. With premium, you get to access more services which are available online. These extra services include plagiarism, sentence structure, and style, general structuring of your article and its flow.

One extra plus to using Grammarly is that once you install it on your PC, it can be available on other platforms of your choice, such email, in Microsoft Word and on your browser. Grammarly runs different checks simultaneously, saving on much valuable time.

5. Coffitivity:

As writers, we draw inspiration from a variety of sources. It varies from writer to writer. Coffitivity is on writing tool that helps writers create the perfect writing environment for them. This particular tool helps with creating background sounds. This tool appeals to those writers whose mental performance when writing is impacted by sounds emanating from the environment.

6. Quabel:

When you are interested in an awesome, distraction-free writing experience, then Quabel is your go to proofreading tool. This is a free online tool offering writers an opportunity for distraction free writing while automatically backing at consistent intervals as you proceed with your work. Therefore, guaranteeing security and availability of your work.

Quabel is a simple tool to use for proofreading. However, this tool is not particularly meant for this purpose, though it still does an excellent job of relieving some of the stress you’d experience while proofreading. Quabel contains basic proofreading features available on standard text editors.

Other than proofreading services, it can help you set the tone of your background, not specifically using music. This is especially good for those who love working with the typewriter sound in the background. This is common with old schoolers who had the chance of using typewriters. Quabel offers a blast from the past for them with the inbuilt typewriter sound effect.

Quabel offers flexibility when it comes to your preferred choice of document format. This makes it easier for you to post to blogs. This means that you can have documents ready in formats that can be posted directly.

7. Google Drive Built in Grammar Checker:

Talk of Google Drive and the first thing that comes to mind is space and storage. We all need that one secure place where we can store our documents without the risk of ever losing them and for easy retrieval when required. Well, your solution is Google Drive. With Google Drive, you get to store files in the cloud creating back-ups for your work.

Google Drive is free and offers 15 GB of Free space. It’s easy to use, and all that will be needed of you is a Google account. Having a Google account allows you to access Google Drive for free.

At times, you can be several people working on the same article or document. So, what do you do to be able to work on the document at the same time efficiently? You use Google Drive. Google Drive, allows all of you to access the document when need to be – simple! This saves you a lot of time.

Thanks to Google drive, sharing your work has never been easier. This means that you can have a number of editors working on the same document at the same time. It will help boost the quality of your work. You can also work on your document on Google drive, and it offers editing and proofreading services that you may need. It’s very simple to use, and should you fail to locate a tool you can always search.

Being able to access your work anywhere anytime is among the perks that come with using Google drive. As a writer, you always have times when you need to check on something in your document, add points to or just referring to previous work. Google Drive gives you instant access as long as you have an internet connection.

Should you misplace your PC or it was stolen, or it gets damaged, you don’t have to panic anymore because of lost data. As long as you have your work backed up on Google drive, you can always get it back.

8. Readability Score:

This is one tool every good writer should have, that’s if you want your readers to get your message. It can be quite disappointing when you put so much effort into doing an article which has no significant meaning to your audience. A scenario whereby your readers need to use ‘thesaurus’ or the dictionary while reading your blog is a clear indication that you need to work on the readability of your articles. So, how can you improve on readability?

Well, of course, you’ll need to avoid using complicated words and try maintaining the flow of your work. You can, however, get readability score to help you out with your document. It’s simple, you just paste either the URL or your text, and you get the readability grade. Premium users get to paste PDF texts. Posts need to be written in a more conversational manner, with short paragraphs and no complex words for it to attain a good readability score. Therefore, easy to read!

9. Hemingway Tool:

Hemingway combines the services offered by both Grammarly and Readability Score. This means you get to check on spelling, grammar, sentence structure, style and flow, wordiness and other typos while checking the readability of your article. Though one needs to exercise caution when using it to check on grammar as its best for advanced writers, individuals with a mastery of language.

This tool will best identify wordiness, long and complicated sentences, use of adverbs and passive voice. It may not be 100% efficient, but it still helps you identify areas that you may need to work on. The solution it offers may not be correct, but it will contribute to writing your sentences better.

This may not be the ideal tool for students to use but for bloggers, it can be lots of fun, especially if you’re good in the language. If you take the time to understand why particular sections of your work were flagged, then using this tool will be easy as it will help save on time while helping you improve your language skills.

Conclusion

Good writers strive to deliver excellent pieces. It’s a time-consuming process that puts our level of patience to the test. For your article to reach the level of you getting acknowledged as a good writer, your work will have to undertake rigorous refining steps. To help ease the process writing and proofreading tools are readily available online. These tools could work for or against you. It’s, therefore, your responsibility as an author to get what works best for you.

Get the tools that identify mistakes made within your article, helps you with the most appropriate corrections and ultimately makes the necessary adjustments to be able to produce a flawless article. As an author, you have had a long list of experiences with using various tools.

Let us know what worked best for you and what you’d recommend for others.