WLet’s face it, no matter how much you write, if your paragraph structure is choppy and fragmented, your readers will skip over those parts and go to the next page. You can save yourself a bit of time and money by using the best online writing editing tools available.
Whether you’re a writer looking to better your writing, a content strategist who needs content creation advice, a sales person looking to increase leads, a website manager trying to find more time or energy to do your job more effectively or an MBA student needing help with that thesis, there are writing tools that will help.
Best Online Writing Editing Tools
1.) Pen and Paper
Welcome to the analog world.
For some writers, the birthplace of their work comes from a pen and paper. The possibilities are endless with these article writing tools. It’s a blank slate for you to begin something fresh. Carrying around a notepad or journal to jot down ideas, phrases, and reminders in general. Jim uses a planner to stay organized and on top of his weekly assignments.
Some of us here at Lantern are also pen aficionados. Some of our favorite writing instruments include the Pentel RSVP, the Palomino Blackwing 602, and the Cross Edge.
And if you don’t have a notebook? Erin has a suggestion for you: utilize the notepad app on your phone. These are for the times when you’re on the go, but don’t have access to a notebook or laptop. When it’s finally time to write, you can always go back to your phone to expand on your idea.
When putting together an editorial calendar, tools like the Google Keyword Planner will help you come up with topic ideas. For instance, you can find a frequently Googled phrase, and use it in your article to gain a broader audience. Choosing a popular keyword will get your online post noticed more because you’ve strategically chosen a phrase that people type into Google. There’s a lot more SEO work that goes into finding the right keywords, but that’s a topic for another day.
To put it simply: Keyword Planner rules. We use it every day.
3.) CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
If you don’t already have a phrase (or at least a concept) in mind, then picking a title can be tortuous. You write a great post, and you want your title to be just as great.
CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer is a must on our top article writing tools because it helps strengthen blog and article titles. It breaks down the title word-by-word and details what you should add or remove. In addition to the informative tips, CoSchedule scores and grades your title. From there, you can type up other variations of your piece’s title for comparison.
At the risk of sounding like a complete dork, it’s fun to play around with the title of your blog. You’ll see the progression from where you started to the final result. We run all of our titles through this tool.
4.) Food
By this time (after searching keywords and coming up with a stellar, eye-catching title) you’re going to need some serious fuel resources.
Healthy food? Yes. Comfort food? Yes!
Anything that will keep the momentum flowing and a writer focused on their work…that’s not messy. The right food for writers is the kind that won’t spill all over your laptop and workspace.
5.) Grammarly
Grammarly is a unique resource because it does more than correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation. It also has features that’ll improve the style of writing you are using (creative? technical? medical?), make vocabulary suggestions, and offers professional proofreading. Grammarly isn’t perfect, and will sometimes miss the wrong usage of a worth, but in general it’s a great tool and we use it every day (in addition to human editors).
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6.) Hemingway Editor
If you’re feeling uneasy about your work, using Hemingway is also a must. If you feel like you over-use clichés and want to make sure your content stands out, you can run it through Hemingway and it’ll highlight any suggested edits and fixes. It spots when you should ditch complex wording or clichés. This tool also recognizes when you use passive voice, and which words and phrases you should replace. We don’t use this tool all the time like many of the others, but we do pull it out every once in a while.
7.) Headphones
An absolute must for writers, and in more ways than one.
Music is therapeutic and stimulates the mind, even in its most fragile state. The type of music that’s playing through the headphones is totally up to the writer. Because there are so many flavors of music, we can’t suggest just one genre. Some writers don’t mind music with lyrics while others do. We actually put together a list of our writing playlists a couple weeks ago!
On the opposite end of the spectrum, our newest Editor, Nic, uses his noise-canceling ear muffs to block out any outside distractions.
Rock on.
8.) Scrivener
Think about any piece of writing you’ve created–an article, blog, school paper, thesis, novel. All of these pieces require more than simply punching in letters on your keyboard. You have to conduct research, take notes, and outline your paper before actually writing anything down.
Scrivener is one of Patrick‘s favorite article writing tools because it’s hyper-efficient in organizing all of his documents. The exporting functions are (in his words) insane because it works with every possible document you’d need: Word, PDF, text files, etc.
What’s also helpful? You can set a designated word count for your piece, and Scrivener will show you your progression. The progress bar is a great feature that will motivate you to finish your work.
9.) Atomic Writer by Atomic Reach
The mother of all article writing tools.
Our esteemed Content Director Amanda recommends using Atomic Writer, especially for business and content marketing writers. Anyone seeking to better their content, reshape their writing, and target the right audience, this software is for you. It’s like a combo of Grammarly and Hemingway in some ways but offers additional insights.
10. Focus Keeper
Focus keeper helps you with productivity. You have to pick a task and set the timer on and work on it until the timer rings. It has a customized interface and it shows your progress in form of a chart.
Here is how it works:
- Choose a single topic to focus on.
- Spent 25 minutes working on that topic while avoiding multitasking.
- Take a short break of 5 minutes after the first 25 minutes cycle. Repeat the same in the four cycles and then take a long break.
- Repeat the whole process next time.
11. Title Case Converter
Title Case Converter is the basic tool that is used to capitalize or lowercase each word you write in your title. It is a sort of headline style which you can use for your blogs, essays, videos, or any sort of content. So that you give a proper style to your title.
In short major words like — nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs are capitalized and minor words like — coordinating conjunction and prepositions are lowercase.
12. Copyscape
Copyscape is a plagiarism tool that helps you to detect whether the same text appears on the web. It can easily identify sites that have copied your content.
All you have to do is paste your link and know where your content has been copied. It is basically used by content owners to detect cases of content theft and to know on which sites the same articles appear. There is even a premium version available if you want to use that.
13. Unicheck Plagiarism Checker
Unicheck Plagiarism Checker is another plagiarism tool but this is paid. If you want to make your article unique and best you need to spend some money on it to check for duplicate content.
It operates with more than 1100 academic institution and has 1 million users globally. For 50 pages to check you need to pay $10 and for further pricing, you can look here.
14. OneTab
OneTab is another extension tool that will help you to convert all of your tabs into a list. If you are the one who is using many tabs at a time then this tool will help you to declutter your tabs. By using this tool you will save 95% of your memory and speed up your computer because you will have a reduced number of tabs open in Google Chrome.
This is a chrome version extension if you want to use it.
15. Hubspot’s Blog Idea Generator
Hubspot’s Blog Idea Generator will help you with new ideas. When you have writer’s block and you don’t know which article to write next this tool will help you with the next content creation.
All you have to do is enter nouns and they will suggest 5 topic ideas at your fingertips based on your search. It won’t give you dozens of ideas but it’s a great starting point if you have nothing to write about.
Conclusion
There are a range of tools which you can use to write articles for clients or content for websites. I found myself struggling to find the best tool for this purpose; some were pretty terrible and others were too new (2016) to be proper choices. Here is my list of three best tools for article writing.