Although writing articles on your blog is not directly related to WordPress development, it helps you in many aspects. Similar to having a multitude of tools empowering your programming endeavors, having some of them while writing an article can make your task easier and the result better, especially if English is not your mother tongue. In today’s post, I’m going to describe some of them.
Text analysis tools
These are the applications which analyze your sentences reporting grammatical, stylistic and spelling errors:
After the Deadline
After the Deadline is an open source web app, created by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. It is completely free of charge and it comes bundled in the Jetpack plugin.
It checks your article when you hit the “Publish” button and underlines the errors. Sometimes, when I’m writing a technical article, it annoys me by marking names of various technology as spelling errors (Nginx, Apache, etc..). Otherwise, it is pretty decent.
Grammarly.com
I’ve started using Grammarly only a week ago, can’t judge its performance much. A nice thing about it is that it can be installed into Chrome as an extension, embedding itself into all input boxes on a page and analyzing the text while it’s written.
Dictionaries, synonyms, idioms
Writing without dictionaries is like programming without Stack Overflow: it’s possible but not very efficient. Here is a short list of some online dictionaries and sites:
- http://www.thesaurus.com/ — synonyms and antonyms
- http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/ — idioms and phrases
- http://sentence.yourdictionary.com/ — how to use a word in a sentence
- https://translate.google.com — for translating words
Google.com search
One of the best online tools for writing better is Google.com search. Just write a word or part of a sentence and it will find it written all over the web. If you don’t know a phrase and Google Translate is giving you a hard time, use Google.
Concluding thoughts
Internet and everything it provides help us compose better articles. On the other hand, I’m still missing an ultimate text analyzer which would correct most of my silly mistakes, essentially replacing a human editor. That would be awesome!
Do you know any other tools and sites which help you with writing? Share them in the comment section below, please.
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