My writing is far from perfect, but I have to say my content is better than it would be if I didn’t have help. Truth is, I have always needed help with my writing. Despite loving to generate content, I have to use numerous tools to assist me. They have helped guide my writing career and made content generation easier throughout the years.
While there are hundreds of writing tools out there to use, I wanted to take the time to share the ones I use that work the best. After all, I could recommend any of them, but these are the ones that have worked for me. These are the tools to use once you have written your content and want to make sure it is high quality and easy to reach. If you are having trouble finding ideas to write about, Ray Wang wrote a great piece for Business 2 Community in 2014 entitled 4 Content Generation Tools Digital Marketers Can’t Live Without.
Unplag
Unplag is a plagiarism and similar content checker. Unlike other plagiarism tools, it has additional functions other than cut and paste plagiarism options. It checks documents against Yahoo and Google and has the ability to compare two files against each other or against documents you save in a database. I save all my content in my own Unplag folder and check new articles against old ones to ensure I am not writing about the same or similar topic. The best thing is that Unplag lets me know if anything I write is inconsistent with my normal writing style. Seeing these changes allows me to review the content and reword anything needed to make it more readable.
Grammarly
I cannot talk enough about Grammarly. It is one of the best tools to use if you are generating content that you want people to read. As with all grammar checkers, it does not catch everything, but close to it. This is the most used and most trusted of grammar checkers. It checks content against more than 250 rules relating to grammar while also checking spelling. It has a plagiarism checker built in as well so you have a second level of help after using Unplag. What I like best about Grammarly is that it shows you issues one at a time so you can deal with them individually as opposed to throwing everything at you all at once.
Readability Score
Readability-Score is one of the most useful sites for writers. Best thing is that it is free (premium features are also available). Simply paste your content into the checker and it will return a rank on the Flesh-Kincaid Readability Scale. You will know how easy your content is to read as well as the grade level it is written for. This is a great tool as I often write for different audiences and want to make sure that I write for my readers. As such, having the correct readability score is vital to obtaining interaction with my content. A bonus is that you will receive a report on word count, sentence count, and number of words per sentence. You can then adjust these to achieve the readability level you desire.
