It’s ok, I’m not judging you. I suck at maths. Like, really suck at maths. My worst nightmare starts with me working at the checkout of a local supermarket. Someone hands me cash to pay for their goods, and I punch the amount it into the computer, which tells me how much change to give them. Then, plot twist: they find a coin in their purse, and hand it to me, assuming I am a mathematician that can do maths equations in my head. I drop the cash, run out the door, and am never seen or heard from again. Anyway, if you’re like me, but with English, here are some writing apps that you should definitely go and download the minute you finish reading this blog post.
Hemingway is our favourite, so it gets to go at the top. Like the man himself, this app is genius. It aims to make your writing bold, clear and easier to read, by highlighting grammar, fluency and sentence structure errors with a cute colour-coded system: blue for adverbs, green for passive voice, purple for alternative words, yellow for hard-to-read sentences and red for very hard-to-read sentences. You’ll get graded on your work as you tweak it — the lower grade, the better. Download Hemingway here.
Grammarly is like a little butler that follows you wherever you go on the www, sweeping up your misspelled words and tidying your silly grammatical errors. Plug it into Chrome and watch it do its thing across live docs and projects, emails, instant messages and social media. Be warned: when you realise you’ve beem making the same mistakes forever, it stings a bit. Download Grammarly here.
Rough Draft teaches us to chill, to stop putting off that blog post or report, and just start writing because it’s just a rough draft. You can always edit it later. The cherry on top? You actually can’t delete words; instead, the delete key will become the strikethrough key. They say it’s the closest thing to writing with a pen and paper without actually writing with a pen and paper. Download Rough Draft here.
The Most Dangerous Writing App is the bad boy of the online writing world, and it is not for the faint-hearted. It works like this: set your session time (five minutes? One hour?) and start writing. Literally start writing and for the love of God, do not stop! If you do, and the timer goes off, all of your work will be deleted and it cannot be recovered – no matter how many times you punch the screen, or how many angry emails you send to the developers. Download The Most Dangerous Writing App here.
If you’ve tried all the writing apps in the world and still can’t wrap your head around double negatives and dangling modifiers, check out our Services page to see how we can help. 🙂