5 Editing Tools I Love To Use For Writing Content
Because there’s no faster way to put off your audience than by riddling your writing with grammatical errors and typos
I am a content strategist by profession, which means a significant part of my job revolves around producing blog posts, eBooks, web content, email and banner copies, and social media captions on an everyday basis. Coming up with meaningful content that interests my clients and their target audience is essential. However, there is one more thing that I always ensure, i.e., my content is always adequately edited.
Now you must be wondering — isn’t that something that all writers should ensure? Yes. But that is easier said than done. Editing is a difficult task in hand. That is because your brain already knows the message you are trying to convey, thus making it easier for the eyes to overlook mistakes.
Trust me — there is no faster way to put off your audience than by riddling your writing with grammatical errors and typos. To escape such a scenario, I found these five editing tools incredible helpful in writing and delivering error-free content:
1. WordRake
The tool is a must-have in-line editing software for writers, editors, and digital marketers who work on Microsoft Word and Outlook email. It helps eliminate redundant words and phrases that often slip in while writing.
Once you have installed WordRake on your laptop, all you need to do is select the text you’re working on and use the WordRake add-in. It tracks changes to suggest edits in your content, which you can reject or accept as you wish.
With WordRake, you can:
- Remove unnecessary jargon and wordy adjective phrases
- Catch high-level punctuation mistakes
- Reduce wordiness
- Correct word usage and nominalizations
WordRake for Microsoft Word is compatible with both MacBook and Windows PC, while WordRake for Microsoft Word and Outlook is for Windows only. To use the former, pay $129 for one year or $259 for three years, and the latter is available at $199 for one year or $259 for three years.
2. Hemingway App
The web app is named after famous writer Ernest Hemingway and identifies errors in your writing with the help of natural language processing. You need to copy and paste your text into the web app, and it will highlight complicated or unnecessary words and phrases.
The app uses five different highlight colors to indicate five common types of errors.
- Yellow indicates a sentence that is too long.
- Red highlights a complicated sentence
- Purple indicates that you can use a shorter word in place of the highlighted text.
- Blue denotes weakening phrases and adverbs.
- Green highlights passive voice
You can use the Hemingway App on both Mac and Windows for free, and there is a premium version with extra features such as exporting privileges, offline use, and directly pasting what you have written into a content management system (CMS).
3. Grammarly
This is a real-time spelling and grammar checker tool that studies minute details in your writing and fixes comma usage, misspelled words, comma splice, and repetitive words. It is available as a web-based tool and a Google Chrome extension.
All you need to do is copy and paste your text into Grammarly’s textbox, and it will instantly do a spelling, grammar, and punctuation check for you. It also corrects poor vocabulary choices, contextual spelling errors, and the use of passive voice.
Grammarly can identify up to 250 types of writing mistakes, and also has a paid built-in plagiarism checker. Moreover, you can get tailored editing suggestions once you set the tone and audience of your content and the purpose of writing it.
There is also a “Get Expert Writing Help” option — at the bottom right of the document — for the Grammarly team to fix spellings, grammar, and punctuation at a cost. The revised document is sent to the user by email.
While you can use Grammarly for free, it won’t catch unclear sentence structures, inconsistent writing style, ineffective vocabulary, overused words, or plagiarism. I regularly use the paid version of the tool, and it is brilliant! Pricing plans start from $11.66.
4. Typely
This is a relatively new writing tool that features a UI similar to a traditional typewriter. It shows you helpful stats such as your word and character count, the time needed to read what you have written, the difficulty level, and more.
Typely also lets you save your work for a later session. You can export your text to a PDF file, which will contain the text along with annotations that point out the results. Another cool feature of the tool is that you can turn on the typewriter sound or play relaxing background music while writing.
Typely also features a Pomodoro timer that you can use if you want to write in sprints. It does not, however, do spelling and grammar checks — instead, it focuses on proofreading to help you write stronger prose. Best of all, the tool is entirely free to use for all platforms.
5. Readable
This is a excellent tool for writers and digital marketers to quickly check the grammar, spelling and readability of their content and make edits wherever necessary.
Readable uses trustworthy readability algorithms based on several tests, such as the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, the Gunning Fog Index and the Coleman-Liau Index, that show you how difficult your text is and how you can simplify it so that more people can understand it easily.
The tool also offers comprehensive spelling, grammar, and punctuation checks, along with helpful statistics such as text composition, reading time, and keyword density. You can use Readable for text pieces, email marketing, spreadsheets, PDFs, URLs, eBooks, and website content (including the sitemap or RSS feed).
The tool features a robust API that lets you integrate its features into your website CMS, Dropbox, or Slack. While Readable is paid, you can try it out for free for seven days and cancel any time.
Over to you
It is not always possible for a fresh pair of eyes to whet your content. Therefore, prevent major grammar guffaws with these editing tools mentioned above. Which ones did you like the most? Tell me all about it in the Comments section below.
