Developing your skill with writing is a constant effort and something that you are always going to have to work at to improve. There are no shortcuts when it comes to practicing your writing; only sitting down and actually writing is going to make a difference. Fortunately, there are a great many tools available that make the actual process of working on your writing far less difficult than it could be, especially in terms of catching small mistakes that you might otherwise miss.
A Dictionary
Spelling is the cornerstone of any piece of writing, and spelling mistakes are the tiny flaws that will bring down even the most beautifully crafted of pieces. Your spelling is the most basic aspect of writing, which means that a mistake in spelling will immediately undermine the feel of a text and pull a reader out of the experience. This is why a dictionary is the most powerful tool in your tool belt. No matter how impressive the rest of your text is, if you make regular spelling mistakes, then they will bring your text down like Achilles’ heel.
A Thesaurus
Repetition is almost as bad as a spelling mistake. If you keep using the same word repeatedly, then your reader will have a hard time going over the text and will have to keep reading it over again. You can see how this becomes a problem in longer texts, especially if there is more than one term that keeps cropping up. A thesaurus is a great solution to this problem. You don’t have to remember every possible way of saying something; you just need to know what you want to say and be aware that you’re repeating yourself; you can use the thesaurus to take care of the rest.
Transcription Software
You would be surprised how beneficial it is to change the way you interact with a text. Something so simple as writing with a pen and paper rather than typing can make a huge difference in the way you are thinking and can even help you to overcome writer’s block. This is why having a solid voice transcription software available to you can be extremely helpful to your writing journey. The ability to dictate rather than write will change how you think about your text and could help you produce something far better.
NaNoWriMo Writing Calculator
Breaking down a large task into smaller, easy to grapple pieces is a brilliant way to make an impossible project much more manageable. This is the foundation of the NaNoWriMo Writing Calculator and why it is so useful to the writing process.
ZenPen
Finally, it is incredibly helpful to be able to work without distraction. Writing is an incredibly intensive process, and because of that, it is easy to latch on to a fleeting distraction and lose your focus on the work at hand. This is why the ZenPen tool is so beneficial. Removing the most obvious distractions from the writing process allows you to focus solely on your writing experience and helps to maintain that all-important focus.