Writing plays a bigger – and perhaps more important – role in our everyday work than ever.
From communicating through your keyboard with colleagues and clients to getting your voice heard across social media to perfecting that blog post or article, writing is imperative to success for professionals in almost any role.
Not to mention those of us who communicate or write for a living. Luckily, various online writing tools can help you cross different writing tasks off your to-do list. Finding the needles from the haystack, however, can be challenging at times. That's why we wrote this blog post.
This round-up brings together tools for writers to be more productive in their day-to-day and improve their writing. We hope it helps you to find the best writing tools that fit your daily needs.
Fluently - Write fluently in any language
Fluently is a distraction-free online text editor with a multilingual translator, a grammar-checker, and a thesaurus built-in. You can use it to create a document in a foreign language while writing in your mother tongue. The translator works side-by-side with the actual editor, so it's easy to see the end result in real-time. There's an integration with the LanguageTool grammar checker, which supports 42 languages. The thesaurus supports synonyms for 21 languages.
gSweets - Superpowers for Google Docs
gSweets is a productivity tool for writers working in Google Docs. It brings slash commands that many already use in their workflow in other apps to Google docs. If you are so used to working with Google's word processor that trying alternative document editors has a high switching cost, gSweets is something that can save you time and keep you in a state of flow when writing with a simple Chrome extension.
MailMaestro - The new way to write on the web
MailMaestro is an AI email assistant that turns short bullet points into ready-to-send emails and messages, like this:
It's the fastest writing experience ever and an entirely new way to write: Instruct with a few words, click, and witness the text write itself.
MailMaestro works where you work, adapts to your daily tasks, and personal style. Designed for the most productive, powered by the latest advancements in AI, it's the best writing tool for those whose work depends on communicating effectively.
Ulysses - The ultimate writing app
Ulysses is the tool of choice for long-form writing. It has loads of features but still allows writers to focus by keeping the number of bells and whistles on the screen to a minimum. The key features include a library for arranging your work, filters to find specific pieces of text quickly, and a goal tracker to keep you on track. Ulysses also features a distraction-free typewriter mode, bookmarks, and outlining functions.
Headline Analyzer from CoSchedule - Write better headlines
A must-try for creating captivating headlines. Just type in your headline, and the app will give you suggestions on how to improve. You'll get a score on a scale of 0-100 and get recommendations on how you're using common, uncommon, emotional, and powerful words. Especially the last two categories of words are important because readers are more engaged when they feel an emotional connection to your headline. Upgrading to a premium plan unlocks some advanced features like SEO score, full version history, and word banks.
Cold Turkey - The toughest website blocker
Cold Turkey allows you to focus by only letting you use the current document you're working on. It restricts or blocks you from visiting certain websites for a predetermined period. Actually, you can block off the entire internet if you want to.
ghost - Turn your audience into a business
If you are monetizing your writing or have ever thought about it, you are likely familiar with services such as Patreon, Substack, and Gumroad. Ghost is an alternative to those. It's a non-profit organization building open source technology for journalism, allowing you to create a business around your writing – and much, much more. A ghost is a useful tool for any writer from individual bloggers who are just getting started, to large teams of writers and editors looking to make money off content, newsletters, memberships.
Noisli - Your digital place for focus
If you need some background noise to be able to focus, Noisli is perfect for you. Noisli lets you choose from a range of soundtracks, such as nature or city-themed: thunder, water, waves, campfire, coffee shop, or train tracks, to name a few. You can mix several tracks at once and choose the volume for each one. That gives you the power of creating unique soundtracks of your own. The app also has a built-in timer for cutting out the soundtracks at the time of your choice.
Daily Prompt - Build your daily writing habit
Anyone who works with creative writing knows how important it is to write regularly. But writer's block is real, and sometimes life and other work get in the way. Daily Prompt provides creative writing prompts to help you to kickstart your daily writing habit. It also allows you to connect with other aspiring authors and help each other grow as writers by giving and receiving feedback.
Typefully - Twitter thread maker
Typefully allows you to write & publish great tweets without distractions. Made by the team behind Mailbrew, it enables you to see a live preview of your tweet thread while you write it, save multiple drafts, schedule, and publish in a focused environment instead of Twitter's mobile app or on desktop.
Hemingway Editor - Make your writing bold and clear
Looking for Grammarly alternative? Hemingway Editor is a simple tool that makes your writing easier to read. It focuses on identifying common errors that lower the quality of your text. It gives you feedback in three main categories: a readability score, writing metrics, and sentence highlights. Hemingway Editor helps you avoid excess adverbs, sentences written in passive voice, and hard-to-read paragraphs. You simply copy and paste your text to the app, and as a result, you'll get some number data along with visual cues and analysis where your text could do better.
Pacemaker Planner - A word count planner for writers
Pacemaker Planner is a word count planner and tracker. You can tell the app whether you would like to write a certain amount every day or focus more on getting results on certain days of the week. You can view your progress in a chart, which gives you a great visual of how you're doing. Pacemaker can also adjust itself based on your current progress.
iA writer - The benchmark of markdown writing apps
Meet the text editor created for the sole purpose of keeping you focused on just writing. iA Writer provides the crisp, uncluttered environment you need to write well, supported by discrete, powerful features. It is so simple that it's easy to overlook the wealth-power it packs under the hood with features such as Content Blocks and Syntax Highlighting.
Cliché Finder - Remove clichés from your writing
Worried that your writing is full of clichés? This helpful writingtool for writers enables you to find them in your text. Just paste your text in the editor, and the tool will quickly point out clichés and allow you to replace it with a specific word or phrase. It's a handy addition to your writing toolset to make your writing more effective and unique.
Craft - Next-generation document editor
Craft is a note-taking app slash word processor that lets you handle text in blocks (a lot like Notion does). It supports bulleted lists, markdowns, pictures, sketching, PDF files, link previews, and more. Craft also lets you create pages from wiki templates and collaborate with others when working on them. Maybe the most distinct feature of Craft is its beautifully minimalistic design and user experience. Many users report that the design simply makes you want to use the app.
ContentPro - Optimize your content
Do you find yourself spending hours and hours on research for the topics you want to write about? ContentPro, created by Automata, finds articles from other companies on the same topic to help you optimize your writing. Their Chrome extension compares whatever you've started to write on Google Docs to their content library to see what industry leaders and competitors say about it.
We hope this blog post introduced you to some writing tools that hold the potential to help your everyday work. Drop us a note if you end up picking up one – would love to hear your thoughts!
