Over the last couple of months I have stumbled across a slew of new writing tools. Below is a collection of ones I determined to be helpful or interesting.
Sharethrough Headline Analyzer: Helps you craft successful headlines that engage the brain, communicate an idea at the moment of impression while still enticing readers to click through to a full content experience. The analyzer will help you analyze and improve the quality of your headlines, optimizing for both impression and engagement. More here.
Expresso: A practical tool to analyze, edit and compare text styles. Enter your text into the web app, hit analyze, and you’ll get a breakdown of filler words, weak verbs, modals, clustered nouns, and more. The tool relies on metrics that are broken down into two groups: metrics for editing and general metrics. As the names suggest, the first group has useful tools for editing your texts and improving writing style while the second one contains other interesting metrics to explore.
Cleartext: A Mac text editor that only allows the 1,000 most common words in English. It is based on Randall Monroe’s Simple Writer, a web app that does the same thing. Don’t miss out on trying out the Trump Mode.
Proselint: This tool calls itself a linter for prose and is currently only available as a command line utility or a plugin for Sublime Text. Its focus is on detecting redundancy, jargon, clichés, sexism, misuse of symbols, malapropisms, oxymorons, hedging, apologizing, pretension, and more.
Hemingway App: This web app puts an emphasis concision and brevity and not general style. Its goal to help your reader will focus on your message, not your prose. There is also a recently released desktop app called Hemingway Editor 2 for Mac and Windows.
