Learn How to Write Like A Pro Every Time With These 5 Links
Writing well can get the best of even the most skilled writer. Especially when it comes to writing concise and relevant content for your website, blog or any other application. Here are our 5 favorite resources to help you learn how to write like a pro every time.
The Headline
The headline of any piece of writing is arguably the most important, and getting it right is a bit of a chore. Fortunately, CoSchedule has a pretty slick little tool to help you craft the perfect headline with balanced emotional and powerful language.
To be honest, receiving a score of 100 is pretty damn impossible, but landing an A+ isn’t too hard. This tool helps you maintain a solid balance of common, uncommon, emotional and power words. Here’s a blog article from CoSchedule that helps explain the different types of words.
Basic Grammar and Sentence Structure
So, basic grammar shouldn’t be a problem for most people. Shouldn’t being the keyword.
Fear not, for there’s an app for that! A couple, actually.
This is a web-based browser plugin that not only live-screens your text in most applications, it also has an available feature which allows you to either write directly in a Grammarly document, or copy/paste your text in.
Grammarly helps you edit basic grammar mistakes, including commas. It is a real jerk about the Oxford Comma though, so don’t be surprised if you see tons of red your first time using the app. While the basic web plugin is free, they do offer a premium paid feature that helps catch more advanced mistakes.
We’ve only just been introduced to this wonder of modern technology, and it’s pretty sweet. Albeit a little confusing at first, but pretty sweet nonetheless.
One warning: it catches just about everything, so don’t feel discouraged after the first round of edits.
Simply copy and paste your text into the editing window and click Analyze. After a few seconds, this craziness will pop up…
If you click on the sections with a red number in the left-hand column, the app will show you exactly what the issue is and what sentence it was found in. Be aware that some slang and modern terms are not being considered. For example it hates the word “plugin”.
Ensuring Web Readability
Writing for web applications like websites and blogs requires a certain amount of readability.
(That’s just a nice way to say your writing should be simple and easy to scan.) In terms of web content and blogging, the best choice is to keep your copy between an 8th-grade and 12th-grade reading level. That allows anyone to be able to scan it quickly without losing any context.
The Hemingway App is great for determining how difficult to read your content is. Simply copy and paste your content right into the web-based app and let it automatically review it for you. The app highlights words and/or sentences in color-coded sections to let you know what is too complex.
Checking for Duplicate Content
Finally, you’re done with a new blog post. You’ve written it from the heart and run it through every single other resource found in this article. But, what if someone out there has already something very similar. Sometimes we subconsciously write from memory, and will unknowingly plagiarize another piece of content. That’s where Copyscape comes into play.
You can either compare your text with another piece of written content for similarities or input your URL and let Copyscape do the work in locating similar content out there.
There’s no doubt about it, there are tons of great resources to help anyone be a better writer, and these 5 resources are only the tip of the iceberg. Do you have a favorite writing resource? Share it with us in the comments below!