If you’ve ever wished you were a little better at getting your thoughts onto paper, then these tools should help. You know your business well, you’ve got a good handle on the problems your clients are dealing with. Your website should reflect that knowledge and experience.
Does This Sound Like You?
- Lack of confidence in your writing skills.
- The ideas in your head are way better than they sound on the page.
- You find it hard to know where to use commas.
- Your blog posts look like a ‘wall of text’.
- You find writing hard going.
These tools will take your writing from messy first draft to polished and professional in no time at all.
Why Should You Bother?
Maybe your website is good enough as it is. There’s a homepage explaining what you do, a team page with a photo from when you all went kayaking, and a few blog posts.
What more do you need?
The thing is, more writing means more chance of hitting the keywords people are searching for. And that means more chance for you to creep up those Google search results.
This QuickSprout article covers that in more detail. They conclude that “If you want more traffic and higher conversions, you should consider long-form copy.”
That’s all well and good, but if you find writing challenging, you’ll want tools to make the task easier.
These tools are simple to use, and they’re free. They’re the perfect helpers whether you’re trying to update your business blog or give your homepage a bit of a tidy-up.
1. Hemingway Editor
I’m jumping right in with my favourite.
Hemingway is the first tool I recommend when someone asks for my help with a writing task.
It’s especially helpful if you’re stuck in that school mindset of trying to use fancy words and sound clever. That might have worked for your English teacher, but it’s not a great strategy when writing for your business.
What does Hemingway do?
It’s an editing tool that helps simplify your writing.
The free version works in your browser. You can paste your text in or write in the tool. Hemingway uses colour-coded highlights to flag up potential issues in your writing. It identifies sentences that are hard to understand, flags up the passive voice, and far more.
Then you edit the text yourself and watch the highlighted sections change in real-time. This part of the process is immensely satisfying.
Hemingway also gives a readability score based on grade levels. (I find Grade 5 or 6 works well, producing an easy read for most readers.)
Here’s an extreme example from the Introduction to Leftover Foods and How to Use Them by Elizabeth O. Hiller.
You can see from the colour-coding that it’s full of sentences Hemingway deems “very hard to read”. The “Post-Graduate” readability level is further confirmation that you’ll need to make some changes.
2. Grammarly
I’m also a big fan of Grammarly. The free version works for most people’s needs. The paid version offers more advanced suggestions.
The big advantage of Grammarly is that it works across hundreds of different apps. Whatever your preferred writing tool, you’ll be able to use Grammarly.
Most of my writing happens in Chrome, in one form or another. Whether it’s in the groups I manage on Facebook, on LinkedIn posts, online forums, or even on my own website. I have the Chrome extension installed, and Grammarly quietly checks my work all day.
There are also apps for Windows, Android, iPhone and iPad, so you can use Grammarly across your devices.
Grammarly is great at picking up the mistakes that pass through most spell-checkers. It offers help to reword sentences and helps make sure your writing makes sense. It’ll tell you when you’ve used an unnecessary comma, and also when you’re missing a comma.
Grammarly is a helpful friend who’ll give your emails a once-over, and you don’t even have to buy it a drink to say thank you. You can call on it day and night without it ever getting annoyed at you.
3. Google Docs
Almost everything I write starts life as a Google Doc. Even if I’m going to post on Medium, or if the client wants it submitted in MS Word, I’ll start with a Google Doc.
Here’s why:
- I find it the best tool for hassle-free sharing.
It’s easy to customise sharing settings so that others can either edit the document or have read-only access. - It autosaves everything, all the time.
Seriously, watch that little save icon at the top and you’ll see it saves after a single keystroke.
If you’ve ever lost hours of work because you forgot to save and the autosave feature on Word didn’t do its thing, you’ll know why this feature makes me so happy. - Collaboration is super-easy.
You can even live chat with others right inside Google Docs. This is the perfect way to get that homepage copy or blog post tweaked and polished to perfection.
The live comments feature lets you make changes in real-time, even if someone else is working on it simultaneously.
Summary of Tools
In case you’ve skipped to the bottom because you just want to know what tools I recommend, here’s the TL:DR list of my 3 favourite writing tools:
- Hemingway – for no-nonsense editing to make your writing cleaner and easier to read.
- Grammarly – spelling, grammar and punctuation help to make your old English teacher proud.
- Google Docs – smooth writing, magical autosaving, and seamless collaboration.
Still Don’t Fancy Writing That Business Blog?
If even these lovely tools haven’t left you feeling confident enough to write your own blog posts or update the writing on your website, that’s okay.
That’s why I’m here.
Let me know what you need, and I’ll take care of it for you.
I’m a freelance content writer based in Cornwall. I write blog posts and web content to help your customers find you online. Drop me a line and let’s chat about your writing needs.