Some Cool Writing Tools I Could Get Used To!

As someone who blogs, and contributes to a lot of web forums, my writing skills matter. I want readers to digest what I say, without the text sounding like I'm talking to a 5-year old. The technical content of a lot of what I post makes that even more challenging. I’m sure I am not the only person who cringes when I see a typo or a bit of appalling grammar in my output.

Today, I came across an interesting page from StumbleUpon, called ‘3 Simple Writing Tools that will blow your mind’.  I did find the inconsistent use of capital letters in that headline to be amusing. But the content was good – and very useful!

The first tool is Headline Analyzer – which does what it says. You type in an article’s headline to the page (http://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer) and then the page analyses the headline for you. It shows common, uncommon, emotional and power words in your headline. Increasing the number of uncommon or emotional words can improve the headline. The page also shows how your article might appear in both google and email! If better headlines increase readership, then so much the better! I’ve bookmarked this page!

The second tool is Hemingway – a tool at www.hemingwayapp.com. You paste your article headline/text into the page, and your text is analysed for thinks like use of passive voice, or for phrases that have simpler alternatives. Running this article’s draft through Hemmingway showed some sentences/phrases that could be improved. This is another page I have bookmarked.

The final tool is called Grammarly. This is a chrome plugin that checks your text as you type into text boxes on Web pages. I installed it, and instantly the SpiceWorks pages give me this nice editor. This tool is free, and I’m already hooked!

Tools like these are a gas!

Thsrs – The Shorter Thesaurus

Thanks to a comment over on Twitter (by @SharnAtlanta), I stumbled upon found the Thsrs (the shorter thesaurus) site), which does what it says. You type in a word, and it finds shorter ones. Entering “glorious” returns: known, blessed, blest and some more.

Why bother, you might ask. Well first, for those addicted to Twitter, Thsrs can help you to get more bang for your  140 character tweet. If you don’t know what Twitter is, of if you don’t care, then this probably is no big deal. If yoiu are a twitter addict, then you can use it to fit more thoughts into your 140-character max limit.

The other place it’s useful is in writing and you want to find a simpler or shorter word. By using shorter or simpler words, you can make your writing a bit more accessible to the average person. This is doubly useful when writing for a global audience (some/many of whom may not speak English, or American, as their native language).

In some cases, for example when you are deliberately [NB: Thsrs suggests by design, by choice, on purpose] writing for a highly educated audience, longer words may be OK. Even if it sometimes feel like the writing is pretentious [NB: Thsrs suggests: flaunty, arty, inflated, showy, splashy] rather than educated. But for mass market, especially an international one where your thoughts are more important than the specific word, then Thsrs can be useful.

As noted on the blog entry, the source of the words used by Thsrs come from the Big Huge Thesaurus. BHT, in turn, gets from the WordNet database, created at Princeton University.

And one final thing – from the main Thsrs page (http://www.ironicsans.com/thsrs/), you can get a search engine plug-in for FireFox (etc) that enables you to add this site for searches. That way, you can search directly from your browser. Neat!

Technorati Tags: Thesaurus,tool,writing,FireFox

ZoomIt Magnifying Applet

Most folks who do presentations know how much of a pain it is to show Windows or applications and have the screen visible to all. Even in a small room, it can be very tough. I'm presenting this week in Kuala Lumpur and want to show OCS's Snooper tool, which is pretty tiny at the back of the huge ballroom. Then I found ZoomIt, a Sysinternals tool that is excellent. A very small application, ZoomIt allows you to blow up the window on screen and enables you to draw. There's also a cool break timer feature that I'm finding VERY useful already.

You can download ZoomIt from Microsoft's web site.  Oh - and it's free - very nice!!

Technorati tags: zoomit, Sysinternals, Microsoft

Network Monitor 3 in public beta

I've been a heavy user of Microsoft's network monitor. Delivered as part of Windows Server and SMS (the latter a fuller version), it's a nice tool for capturing and analysing network traffic. It's not been updated for years - allowing WireShark (Ethereal as it used to be known) to take a lead in terms of functionality.

But MS has been hard at work with Netmon 3, which is now in public beta. Network Monitor 3 is a total re-write of capture engine, parser engine, and user interface. It runs on Windows XP and Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Longhorn; and is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

One of the coolest new features is display while capturing - you can see the packets as they are captured. Neat!

To get this, go to http://connect.Microsoft.com, logon using your MS Passport ID. Then click on Available Connections and select Network Monitor 3.0. The download is just 3mb!

Thanks to Nick Portlock for pointing out this cool beta.

Technorati Tags: network monitor - microsoft - tool