Whether writing is part of your everyday routine or you’re facing a major, one-time project, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.
Quip boasts customers like Instagram and Facebook, the latter which uses the tool to share checklists and create meeting agendas, as reported by TechCrunch. Self-described as a “collaborative word processor and messaging system” that works on and offline, Quip lets you edit as you write, catching spelling errors in real time, and chat with people who have access to the document.
Draft – though Google Docs, Word Web App, and Quip come with collaborative editing features, they don’t offer the editing insurance of Draft. Draft’s take on editing is that a collaborator’s changes don’t immediately alter the original document—instead, a new version is created for each round of editing. After someone submit edits, it’s up to the document owner to individually accept or reject them.
Etherpad’s color-coded writing feature lets users see who’s writing what at a glance, and once a document is done, attributes what each person has contributed in a digestible format. But be warned: if too many people work on one document, it looks like rainbow sherbet exploded all over the screen. You don’t need an account to use Etherpad, so it’s great for teams that don’t want to deal with signing up and logging in.
After the Deadline is similar to Hemingway, but it focuses more on spelling and grammar than shortening your prose.Copy and paste your text into the box, and the scan will catch undesirables like unnecessary use of the passive voice, redundancy, overly complex word usage, and spelling errors. The “explain” feature tells you why something is wrong, but offers the same general explanation for the each genre of errors (“Active voice makes it clear who’s doing what.”). It won’t offer suggested fixes outside of a drop-down menu of potential options for misspelled words, and I’ve encountered instances where it doesn’t catch something.
Whatever combination of tools you use from this list, hopefully they help you produce quality writing faster.
Though these aren’t the only tools that can help you in those departments: There are citation apps like Zotero and Ctfm, or distraction-free word processors like Ommwriter and Ulysses that could be helpful, too. Is there an app that you’ve found essential to you writing and editing workflow?
Source: 15 Tools to Write and Edit