By Mwebe Morgan | 7th February 2022
Are you a content writer, author, student, blogger, editor, or copywriter?
Smart writing apps and productivity tools are now used by writers to help them write faster and more creatively. With so many free writing software, tools, and apps available, writers are spoiled for choice.
You want the best creative writing software as well as tools to assist you with the task, but you don't want to spend a lot of money to improve your writing skills. Read this cheat sheet to help you write more effectively and quickly!
I'm sure you've heard this saying, “A bad craftsperson blames his or her tools.”
If you've heard this a lot, you might feel bad about looking for writing tools. Even seasoned authors require inspiration and a conducive environment to keep them writing. It's not ideal to spend every day at the computer looking for the perfect tool to make you more productive and enjoyable.
If you can find appropriate writing applications, tools, and resources to help you create exceptional content, you'll thank yourself when it comes time to edit. Here are some of my personal favourites, organized into categories based on how they can be used.
Table of Contents
Writing Apps for Accuracy
Grammarly is one of my favourite writing tools, and I couldn't possibly list them all! Grammarly's products do more than just identify grammar and spelling mistakes; they also offer detailed writing enhancements focused on clarity, conciseness, and tone. Grammarly is a free web browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, and you can check longer pieces of writing in Grammarly's online editor. Grammarly Premium, a paid service, includes additional features such as writing feedback, plagiarism detection, and style and vocabulary enhancements.
The majority of writers believe ProWritingAid should be at the top of this A-list. ProWritingAid is a one-stop-shop for online editing, writing coach and style guide. It detects overused words, transitions, vague and abstract words, and other potential pitfalls in your writing that your average grammar checker on the PC misses.
The free ProWritingAid online editing tool allows you to upload your documents and gain access to over 20 in-depth writing reports, allowing you to quickly and easily improve the strength and clarity of your texts.
You'll get an overview of your writing, as well as advice on how to improve it fast. You'll also be learning as you write, thanks to informational videos and blog articles that appear as part of the process.
Ginger is an AI-powered writing assistant that corrects your texts, improves your style, and boosts your creativity. Ginger goes beyond spelling and grammar. It considers full sentences to suggest context-based corrections. This drastically speeds up your writing—especially for long emails, texts, or documents!
Get suggestions from Ginger while posting a tweet, writing on Gmail, drafting a Word document, and anywhere you write!
Writing is difficult sometimes, but Quillbot perfects your work with grammar and sentence checkers. If you need to review your writing or check the grammar mechanics, QuillBot helps you make the editing process painless. QuillBot’s free online sentence corrector assists you in avoiding mistakes and polishing your writing, letting your ideas shine instead of your typos.
QuillBot’s free online paraphrase and grammar checker tool to perfect your English. You can use it free for the first 125 words to paraphrase your writing and check for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. For more features, you can its annual subscription!
Grammarly and the Hemingway Apps are almost in the same vein but differ a bit. Hemingway helps you improve your writing skills. This awesome tool focuses on sentence structure and readability rather than grammar and spelling. The Hemingway Editor removes unnecessary words from your writing. Wordy sentences are highlighted in yellow, while more egregious ones are highlighted in red.
By emphasizing adverbs, passive voice, and dull, complicated words, Hemingway helps you write with power and clarity. For a small fee of $19.99 per license, you can make your writing bold and clear.
Slick Write is a free, sophisticated and powerful application that easily checks your writing for grammatical errors, stylistic mistakes, and other syntax features. Are a blogger, writer, SEO professional, or student writing an essay! Slick Write takes your writing to the next level. It’s amazing! Check out Slick Write and see why it is the best.
Grammar Lookup uses artificial intelligence to check grammar and punctuation mistakes in your writing, eliminate spelling errors and highlight 1000s of style issues to make your writing exceptional among other writers. It is the best proofreader for all because of its ease of use and rapid checking. It's free and always will be, so give it a shot.
Word Processors
Google Docs – Free
Google Docs is a well-known online word processing application. Its collaboration and organization features assist you in writing a draft of your short story and sharing it with a few friends for feedback.
Google Docs allows you to save your documents in Google Drive, and also allows you to access them from anywhere. Google Docs is straightforward and lacks a plethora of bells and whistles. However, for writers who are easily distracted, the simplicity of Google Docs may be the key to focusing. You can use Google Docs offline too to write your documents.
Microsoft Word is a well-known word processor in the Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft Word, as one of the first word processors in the world, probably has the most formatting options. If you need to create a longer document with multiple sections or headers, Word has you covered. Be ready to buy a genuine licence to use its full potential.
Microsoft Notepad is a fantastic tool for writing and copying programming code. Unlike MS Word, which automatically formats the code, rendering it unusable, Notepad retains the formatting precisely as you wrote it.
Notepad allows you to produce neat text files in.txt format that can be opened in other word processing software such as Word. After you've produced the files, you can create, save, or print the document. To make it easier to use these tasks, keyboard shortcuts are available.
Twords
Twords bills itself as “the web app that nudges you to write.” The app works on three pillars: awareness, accountability, and consistency. Twords helps you become more conscious of your writing habits by tracking how much you write each day and month. When you miss several days of writing, your “accountability buddies” notify you. If you experience writer's block, consult a library of prompts, set a timer to challenge yourself to write for a set amount of time, or read an article about the habits of successful authors.
LibreOffice is a sophisticated and free office suite that is the successor to OpenOffice(.org), which is used by millions of people worldwide. For those looking for a free alternative to Microsoft Word, LibreOffice is an excellent choice. Its simple design and feature-rich tools allow you to unleash your creativity while also increasing your productivity.
Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (vector drawings and flowcharts), Base (databases), and Maths are just a few of the apps included in LibreOffice, making it the most versatile Free and Open-Source office suite on the market (formula editing).
yWriter is a word processor that divides your novel into chapters and scenes, allowing you to keep track of your progress while freeing up your mind to create. If an organisation is vital to you, you'll appreciate yWriter. This free writing program makes it simple to organize your narrative and character development! It will not write your novel, propose narrative ideas, or do any creative work for you. yWriter was created by an author, not a salesperson!
WPS Office is a professional and robust office suite that delivers significant features and computing capacity, as well as meeting various circumstances in daily life for rapid creation and cooperation. WPS Office demonstrates a passion and creativity to help you stand out among your peers. To manage your filing, you can sync local folders or files to the cloud. WPS offers thousands of professional free templates organized by category. You can use these templates to personalize your creative designs on work papers including resumes, project plans, reports, and courseware.
Calmly Writer is a free online editor with a simple, unobtrusive, and easy-to-use user interface that focuses on what you want to say. Calmly Writer is available for free desktop use! Because the Desktop App can work on local files directly, you only need to save the documents in your Google Drive or Dropbox folder (having installed some of these applications). Calmly Online can open and save Google Drive documents.
Do you develop beautiful layouts for your text as a writer? If so, Scribus might be a good fit for you! Scribus is a free and open-source framework for creating rich, professional layouts for everything from one page to magazines. While it does require some understanding to get started, Scribus is both easier to use and less expensive than overrated products such as Adobe InDesign.
Book Writing Apps
Shaxpir is more than just a word processor. It's a personal writing place where you may flesh out fresh ideas for novels, memoirs, short stories, articles, and more. Shaxpir's drag-and-drop features make it simple to reorganize your manuscript, modifying the order and hierarchy of chapters to discover a structure that works for your plot.
You have a story to tell, why not use Shaxpir to create your own worlds and populate them with various characters?
Scrivener is the go-to tool for writers of all genres, with best-selling novels, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, students, professors, attorneys, journalists, translators, and others using it daily. Scrivener, in my opinion, is the best writing program for authors. Scrivener will not tell you how to write; instead, it will offer you everything you need to start and continue writing.
Scrivener is designed for extensive writing projects, and it eliminates page anxiety by letting you produce or research your material in any sequence, in as large or tiny portions as you like. Have a wonderful idea but don't know where to put it? Scrivener is free for 30 days!
KDP Wizard works by integrating your Kindle Direct Publishing data with Airtable, a powerful yet user-friendly database application.
Because KDP Wizard only acts as a bridge between your Amazon KDP data and the trusted Airtable API application — no one stores your data or routed through a third-party server. It's completely safe and secure.
Back up your entire KDP bookshelf — one page at a time, or one book at a time. KDP Wizard will present your data for you all to use to increase your productivity straight within your KDP account bookshelf and the Chrome browser extension.
Kindle Create (from Amazon) is a free interior formatting tool that works well with most books you want to publish on Amazon, but there are requirements and supported features we want you to know about before you download.
Kindle Create gives a step-by-step tutorial to format and create a professional quality kindle book.
Productivity Tools
Evernote is a software program that syncs digital items across all your devices. Tame your work, organise your life! With your notes, tasks, and schedule all in one place, you can remember everything and accomplish any project in time.
Work anywhere—Keep important info handy—your notes sync automatically to all your devices. Evernote remembers everything—make notes more useful by adding text, images, audio, scans, PDFs, and documents.
Todoist is a task management application that helps writers and others create to-do lists and custom schedules, so you can work more effectively. The best writers can organise and prioritise their work, using Todoist. You can create recurring tasks!
Clear your mind and regain clarity and serenity by getting all those things out of your head and onto your to-do list (no matter where you are or what device you use).
You will be surprised at how this app helps you set and achieve goals. Never worry about forgetting a critical task again!
Diaro's user-friendly interface allows you to organise everything conveniently, whether it's a short note or a lengthy diary entry. Your life is valuable as a writer, and if you're the type who documents the life and wants to remember every moment, good or bad. Diaro is an advanced and powerful diary application that can keep a journal or simply take notes.
Diaro assists you in organising and documenting your thoughts and memories. The best part is that you can include photos or locations with your entries and share them with others via email and social networking sites. Because your diary will be password protected, you will never have to worry about others uncovering your deepest, darkest secrets with this award-winning software.
Milanote is a simple application for organizing your thoughts and projects into visual boards. As a writer, visualisations can help you keep track of everything from character relationships to the order of scenes. Milanote enables you to collect everything in one place and to write notes and to-do lists (handy for keeping yourself on track with your book writing plan), upload images and saves images, texts, and links from the web.
FocusWriter is an excellent tool for writers who are easily sidetracked. Sometimes, technology can be awfully distracting. Having too many features in your writing programme can be too much clutter to focus on writing! Focus Writer is free, multiplatform, and open-source. It provides live statistics for words and paragraphs, dictionary support, tabbed organization, and the ability to establish daily goals. FocusWriter is what you need if you are searching for a good tool focused on the writing field.
Top Apps for Bloggers
As writers and bloggers, we don't just have to worry about the words we put on the page (or screen). Many of us must create images for our work, whether that's a cover photo for a blog post or a graphic to promote our writing or book on social media. Canva is an incredible, powerful free tool for creating gorgeous images.
Canva's drag-and-drop templates may assist you in creating anything from a Pinterest image to a book cover. If you're hesitant to learn Photoshop, Canva is an astounding alternative to help you create rich, high-quality graphics. More manna from heaven is available with the Canva Pro edition.
The Content Idea Generator on Portent allows you to generate catchy titles for your next blog post, podcast, or video. The Content Idea Generator on Portent allows you to generate catchy titles for your next blog post, podcast, or video. Simply enter your subject and the Idea… Portent will do the rest! Simply enter your topic, and the Idea Generator will generate a creative title and advice on how to take it to the next level.
Even the best writers experience writer's block occasionally. Simply ask Stephen King! When it feels impossible to come up with new content, Hubspot's Blog Topic Generator can assist you.
Blog Topic Generator by Hubspot Just enter three nouns into the generator, and you'll have a week's worth of topics in seconds! It’s that simple!
As a writer, you know the importance of engagement and finding lists for the site. Fyrebox facilitates quick quiz making for your website. Just create quizzes to generate leads, to teach your students or visitors, or simply to entertain. Last, Fyrebox adds Interactivity to your teaching, helps you do market research, and helps your business to grow.
The headline analyser provides several readabilities, SEO, and sentiment scores. It differentiates between common and “weasel” words, which are those that don't help convey much meaning.
It provides tips for improving SEO in your headlines. You'll discover how to use power words and positive word counts.
Website Grader is a free online tool that evaluates your website based on key metrics such as performance, mobile readiness, SEO, and security.
A website grader is an inbound marketing tool that provides a grading of your website. The website grader evaluates your website's strengths and weaknesses using a 100-point scale.
New writers face an uphill task of creating privacy policies on their websites. Not everyone understands how to create a Privacy Policy agreement, particularly with CCPA, GDPR, CalOPPA, PIPEDA, or Australia's Privacy Act provisions. You will be in the dark if you are not a lawyer or are unfamiliar with Privacy Policies. Some people may even take advantage of you because of this. Some people may even attempt to extort money from you. That is where the privacy policy generator comes in to assist in protecting you by creating a Privacy Policy.
Stock Image Sites
Pixabay is a thriving creative community that shares royalty-free photos and movies. Discover the greatest Pixabay free pics! Images and videos are licensed under the Pixabay Licence and may be used for nearly any purpose, including commercial purposes. Although attribution is desired, it is not needed.
Welcome to Pixlr, the undisputed leader in photo editing and design software. For free, you can edit photographs and create gorgeous graphics straight in your browser, on your phone, or your PC. Begin with an empty canvas, a photo, a video, or one of our professionally designed themes. Pixlr allows you to create templates, animations, remove backgrounds, use filters and effects, and create collages.
Pexels gives you unlimited access to over 3 million free, high-resolution photos and videos. You can use all images for free, or even for commercial use. All images are completely royalty-free and licensed under the Pexels licence. Use them for any project you want.
Unsplash is home to over 3.5 million free high-resolution images brought to you by the world's most generous community of photographers. The entire Unsplash library consists of curated high-resolution photos now freely available for your use, if you acknowledge the source.
You can browse the free images' platform with over 300,000 free stock photos, just like on Pixabay. You can quickly locate the ideal royalty-free image and download free, high-quality stock images for personal or commercial use.
Stocksnap understands how important it is to find the exact right image for the success of your creative project as a writer.
Whether you're designing a business website, a print brochure, a digital, or magazine ad, or some other brilliant creative project, you know that a great image elevates your content from “good” to “great.”
Stocksnap helps you to succeed, create compelling, eye-catching, attention-grabbing work on the web using sharp, arresting visual images.
That is the reason for StockSnap's existence.
Final word
All authors have access to a plethora of writing programs, software, and resources. There are writing applications and tools available that can be utilized for any writing assignment, both paid and free.
You don't have to spend a lot of money to get some top writing software and tools.
Hooray! For word processing, book writing, short story writing, and spelling and grammar checkers, there are various open-source and free software choices.
Are you ready to start writing a book or working as a content writer or blogger? The writing tools on this list will therefore be more than enough to get you started on your trip.
The majority of the software and tools are user-friendly and easy to learn. What's your justification for not writing?
Mwebe Morgan is a content producer, writer, editor, and proofreader. He specialises in academic, technical, and business writing. Mostly, he works with business owners, writers, and students. Also, he loves narration, poetry, children’s literature, and non-fiction.
