An editor is a luxury we copywriters don’t always have. That’s when writing apps can help point out mistakes we might not see in our writing. Listed below are some of my favorite writing apps and add-ons that I use regularly.
Hemingway
Hemingway offers a free online editor or a paid desktop app. It checks for passive voice, complicated sentences, and weakening phrases and qualifiers. The app assigns a grade level, readability score, and estimated total reading time.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a helpful Chrome extension. Whatever you’re writing online (be it your blog, a Facebook post, an email), Grammarly examines it for grammar, punctuation, proper sentence structure, and word choice. However, it does not check Google Docs inline.
I use the free version, but there are also paid Grammarly Premium subscriptions with additional features including a plagiarism checker.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a free WordPress plugin. It offers many SEO-related features, but in terms of writing, it does the following:
- Grades your writing on the Flesch Reading Ease test to help with readability. (Read another way, how easily scannable is your content?)
- Counts the percentage of sentences with transition words and phrases.
- Provides word count in the context of SEO. For instance, it looks at whether the number of words following a subhead is too long, or whether any individual paragraph is too long.
- Counts the percentage of sentences that contain more than 20 words, which can make reading more difficult.
- Counts the percentage of sentences that use passive voice and highlights them.
Sometimes Yoast will offer improvement suggestions that I consider but ultimately don’t take. For example, I think it’s fine for my blogs to score lower than recommended on the Flesch Reading Ease score. This score is mostly calculated on the length of sentences and the number of syllables per word. I know my audience can handle big words and long sentences. Even still, greater clarity is something we should always aim for in our writing.
Just Not Sorry
Stop tempering your emails in ways that undermine your leadership. With the Just Not Sorry Gmail extension, you’ll be warned about words and phrases that minimize confidence.
As founder Tami Reiss told Slate, too many women inadvertently discredit their own opinions. “We thought: What if we changed the environment? What if we pinged someone to say, ‘Hey, you’re doing this thing that you probably don’t want to do. The response is going to be unconscious to someone else, but it’s going to have a really big impact.’”
Beyond just and sorry, this writing app flags phrases like actually, I think, and Does this make sense? The extension is open-source to enable you to add more stop-words to flag as though they were spelling errors.
Do you have favorite writing apps? If so, feel free to share them with me! I’d love to know how you use them in your day-to-day work.
Also published on Medium.