iA Writer for Mac & iOS: The Best Word Processor You've Never Used
Be it a school paper or a blog post, all of us at some point find ourselves in the position of having to dump a bunch of characters into a text file. While cell phone operating systems are tripping over themselves to embrace flat, minimalistic design, Microsoft Word looks like the control panel for a space shuttle. Thankfully, iA Writer for Mac and iOS bucks that trend, and is perhaps the most joyously simplistic text editor that you can find on the market today.
Make Writing Papers Easier - 4 Websites That Help You Cite Sources
When the time comes to write a paper, one of the biggest pains can be citing your sources. You've spent hours and hours slaving away over your computer, perfectly crafting every word. You're cruising for an easy A, and then you have to go and spend even more time citing all those sources. Thankfully, the Internet makes this arduous part of the paper writing process a little easier.
Scrivener: The Best Writing Program for the Mac and PC
Scrivener has been around since 2006, and it is a favorite application amongst novelists and screenwriters. Scrivener is not a desktop layout application like Word and Pages, but it helps you organize and export your documents to other applications. As a full-time non-fiction tech writer, I can't recommend Scrivener enough for actually starting and drafting writing projects and today I will share my personal workflow and tips for getting the most out of Scrivener.
How This Freelance Writer Maximises Productivity With Windows 8 & Windows Phone 8
My personal desktop setup has changed considerably in the past few months since purchasing the Acer Iconia W7 series tablet, which I use as my primary PC. Gone is the tower of my old self build AMD-powered game station, replaced by far more compact dimensions, a new monitor and an external HDD. This is the main hub of my professional life: a Windows 8 tablet. Yes, you read that right. Let me demonstrate how you can be productive with Windows 8. It is possible, and with the right apps you can get great results.
5 Sites To Learn How To Write A Book And Get It Published
There are millions of people all around the world who want to be professional writers, yet only a tiny fraction of them ever make enough money to write full-time. It’s a market that is saturated in terms of supply, so you need to be excellent or revolutionary to even be noticed. Fortunately, there are many resources out there that will get your feet wet. Here are five of my favorites.
WriteApp: Is This The Distraction Free Online Writing Tool You Were Looking For?
There are a few things I ask of any writing application or a text editor. Yes, it should be minimal but it should have a few features to aid the words I key into the screen. Privacy is on top of the list. The ability to back up my work is close behind. Then, a little bit of markdown support is always welcome. WriteApp is a relatively new online writing tool that ticks all three boxes.
Looking For A Good Markdown Editor On Chrome? Try Your Writing On Textdown
If you do any form of writing on the web – as a developer, or as an author – it's about time you became familiar with one of the more lightweight languages out there. Markdown is a simple markup language that's easier than HTML. In fact, you can think of it as a big brother to plain text writing. Developers know all about it. It's time, we simple writers became familiar with it.
Not Just For Coders: Top Version Control Systems For Writers
The mention of version control or revision control makes it seem like something for geeks. You will be surprised to know that version control systems have their place not only in academic writing but in anything that has to do with typing an alphabet on a document. As writers, we know the word draft. But draft is a mere rough sketch and it doesn't actually take us back in time to the incremental changes we make.
How To Use Social Media As Inspiration For Your Writing
We blog. We post. We upload. We share. We like. We Tweet. Using social media, we all write our own individualized own history books. Every relationship, every kiss, every romantic thing we hear - we broadcast it to the Internet. Some might say we are a narcissistic society. I say that we are just sentimental. Yet the content of our autobiographies are scrambled across multiple friending sites built upon advertising alone.
Grammarly Lite - A Browser Extension For All Your Proofreading Needs [Chrome, Firefox, Safari]
How do you currently proofread what you type on your computer? Type it in Google? Paste it into Word? Or do you use a proofreading website that you paste your text into? I am definitely guilty of copying and pasting (or just typing) a word into Google Search to double check my spelling. But there's a better way – a tool that integrates into your browser and almost all websites across the Internet.
For Literary Penguins: 4 Great Writing Tools [Linux]
A great amount of productivity comes from writing tasks, whether it be for school assignments, articles for your blog, or much more. While full-featured office applications tend to be the norm for such tasks, it may sometimes be a good idea to go in the opposite direction and use some simpler or specialized tools, depending on what you’re working on. Often, this can either help you focus more on the work that's ahead.
8 Tumblr Blogs Every Writer & Book Lover Should Follow
Tumblr is known as being a great blogging platform for visual content, and is a photographer's smorgasbord of just about everything you could possibly imagine. That said, there's also an incredible wealth of content that can provide inspiration to writers, poets and book lovers. We've already introduced to you to 10 creative blogging ideas to try out on Tumblr if you're suffering from writer's block, and you can now combine them with these 8 blogs.
Yarny - Take Your Creative Writing To The Clouds With The Distraction Free Editor
Writing is almost like meditation. The mind whirrs around a million thoughts, but anyone who has been in the zone will attest to the fact that the calmness enveloping it shuts off the writer from the rest of the world. Creative work needs silence and a distraction free environment to connect those million thoughts. I am a writer in the very basic sense of the word and I have gone through my basic share of distraction free editors.
Writing For the Digital Age: 5 Free Writing Style Guides Online
English is the language the world speaks and we have to put in our two bits to do it correctly. The web has created a global audience, so if you are among the ones who write in English for a living, you got to be word perfect even you may not be pitch perfect with your accents. As a writer and blogger, I know the pitfalls of a language error. If writing perfection is your calling card, you need a Style Guide by your side.
Forget Your Laptop - You Can Word Process On Your Android Tablet With These 4 Superb Apps
As mobile devices become more and more prominent as productivity tools, so an increasing number of apps offering solutions become available. Earning my living as a freelance writer, I’m particularly interested in word processing on my Android tablet, which I use as a proxy laptop computer. Thanks to a selection of useful apps – native and third party – I’m able to work from just about anywhere!
Write More Good: 7 Free Online Tools To Ensure You Use Proper English
Improper use of English is one of my pet peeves. I’m not a full-blown "grammar nazi" (a colloquialism for someone very strict with grammar) but it does irk me. An exception can be made for those who don’t use English natively, but blatant disregard for the rules of language can be seen all over the Internet - and it can be quite annoying. Language is meant to convey ideas through a common medium that obeys a set of rules.
Write Space: A Distraction-Free Text Editor Right Inside Your Browser [Chrome]
Distraction-free editors are all the rage these days, and I’m fully aboard the train as a raving fan. I love the fact that these editors block out everything else on the computer so that you can write in peace. There’s a lot that could be said regarding our culture, that we need distraction-free programs in order to concentrate, but that’s for another article entirely. In terms of software programs, there are a bunch of different distraction-free editors you can pick from.
Auto Text Expander Turns Repetitive Text and Content Into a Breeze [Giveaway]
As a writer, blogger, and serial emailer, you can imagine that I go through repeating myself several times throughout an average day. Auto Text Expander ($29.95) allows you to associate blocks of text to abbreviations or keyboard macros. Read on through this post to learn more and win one of 25 licensed copies of Auto Text Expander, retailing at nearly $750 in total!
Zen for Writers: Finding a Calm, Peaceful State For Your PC That Would Inspire Productivity
Writing is one of the toughest jobs in the world. It's lonely and you have to focus and think at the same time. Our brain, however, is constantly looking for new stimuli. It loves nothing more than entertaining random thoughts and shifting attention to attractive signals. That's how you get distracted and side-tracked and this is what makes writing so hard. Most professional writers have a routine and a matching workspace to get into the flow of writing.
4 iPhone/iPad Apps For Brainstorming Writing Ideas, Plots, & Characters
Most writers would agree that pre-writing—e.g., brainstorming ideas, plots, characters, situations, scenes–is the best way to get the writing juices flowing, and actually get stories and novels to completed. Sometimes without a roadmap for where the stories might wound up, they may never get finished. Four iOS apps may prove to be useful tools for discovering plots, character names and traits, and keeping track of notes.