JUST A FEW TIPS & TOOLS FOR YOU
- American Grammar Checkups This is where Susan Rooks, the “Grammar Goddess” and author of our GRAMMAR MATTERS column, helps business professionals strengthen their communication skills. This should be your first stop if you’re seeking to polish your English composition skills.
- Grammarly This is a free and simple extension that is compatible with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari browsers and can be installed on Mac OS and Windows. Grammarly not only checks your spelling and grammar but your vocabulary too. Its context-specific algorithms work across platforms, making that all-important tweet, intro, or headline get attention for all the right reasons.
- Hemingway App Do you find that your first paragraphs run over 30 words? Are you being too garrulous and convoluted, overly dense, and meandering, so that your readers need a dictionary to decipher your words? Is your copy rife with split logic, junctions, and subordinate clauses? The Hemingway App is what you need to write clean copy: unadorned, direct, active, and to the point. Hemingway honed his style as a journalist for many years before becoming a novelist.
- Emotional Value Headline Analyzer This free tool will analyze your headline to determine the Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) score. As you know, reaching your customers deeply and emotionally is a key to successful copywriting, and your headline is unquestionably the most important piece of copy you use to reach prospects.
- The Up-Goer Five Text Editor One of writing’s challenges is taking complex ideas and making them easy to understand. Think you’re a master?
- The Shorter Thesaurus One of the keys to great writing is simplicity. Often a perfectly good little word is pushed aside for something fancy. That’s a mistake. Try this tool to find a better, shorter synonym.
- Word Frequency Counter Do you have a tendency to, like, write, like the same words, like all the time? This tool can find out for you. They also have one to check phrase frequency.TTS Reader One great way to test your writing: read it out loud. But sometimes, it’s even better to hear someone else read it. You can even ask it to read to you in different accents!
- Scrivener is the go-to app for writers of all kinds, used every day by best-selling novelists, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, students, academics, lawyers, journalists, translators, and more. Scrivener won't tell you how to write—it simply provides everything you need to start writing and keep writing.
Style Guides
- Guardian & Observer Style Guide This is the guide to writing, editing, and English usage followed by journalists at the Guardian and Observer.
- BuzzFeed Style Guide aims to provide a prevailing, and evolving, set of standards for the internet and social media. This style guide is updated regularly to ensure it remains relevant and responds accordingly to changes in language and common, casual usage.