not become a better writer but appear to be a better writer by making less mistakes, by

plowing your way through writing roadblocks by hook or by crook or by using the best tools

available to help you compose more effectively and efficiently your thoughts into a writer

form, writing tools today on Dottotech. I should have used some for my preamble.

Let’s start by just talking about simple, simple basic writing. I increasingly just

use Google drive as my word processor. Why do I use Google Drive? Because it’s online

and almost all of my writing now happens online. But occasionally I need a little bit of help.

Now I’ve talked in the past about Grammarly, which is my grammar checking editor and I’ll

talk about that again at the very end today. It’s a tool that helps me with my process

of writing. But when I’m actually just writing in Google

Docs or in Google Drive—I’m still used to calling it Google Docs—when I’m in

Google Drive—I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s getting older—I still sometimes

confuse words. If you look for a list of commonly confused words on the internet, I confuse

almost all of those words all of the time and every time I confuse a word, I have to

sit there and think which word I’m supposed to be using.

For example, here at the very beginning of this text, one of the words I have trouble

with is “effect.” Is it “effect” or “affect?” I know the difference. Right

now as I’m speaking to you, I absolutely know the difference but does that mean that

25 minutes from now when I’m writing, I’m in the middle of writing, that I will know

the difference? No. For some reason, I forget. So within Google Drive, a lot of us just right-click

on the word and look, you can define the word. You can bring up a little definition in and

up comes Google Research which tells you a description of the word. That is awesome.

You should use this a lot. If you’re experiencing a little bit of writer’s block or some issues

around things, you want to use a different word, down in the bottom of each time they

do a definition, they will give you synonyms so you can come up with maybe a different

word that works better, especially if you’re using the same word over and over again. So

tip #1 for better writing, right-click your mouse on the word, especially if you’re

in Google Docs, and use the resources that are available to you.

Tip #2, this one I really like for a whole variety of reasons. It’s a simple little

web service called Word Counter and all they do—I’ve just copied some text in here

of an article—is you ask it to go through and how often am I using this word or these

words. You can see if you’re using one word too repetitively within the document which

again allows you to go back in that if you realize that you’re using a word too often.

Now this particular document was about Bluetooth headsets so the word “headset” being there

a lot was important. But here is an additional benefit. If you’re

writing for the web and you want to write SEO, search engine optimization-friendly content

and there are certain keywords that you want in that document to help Google find that

document as it’s searching, you can use this as well to make sure that you’ve got

a number of instances of your keywords within a document as you search it. That is a hidden

benefit in this little tool called Word Counter. Now the next tool I like just because it’s

got the best title of any product that I’ve ever seen – Write or Die 2 by Dr. Wicked.

This is a word processor and it’s available in a desktop version but the online one works

great. It cost like $20 to buy the full version but what it does—I’m going to enact her

and start it playing so you can see how it works—is as you’re writing, it plays back

nice sounds. It does all sorts of nice things for you.

But if you’re not writing, if you’re not moving along and kind of getting through the

work that you have to get done, like I’ve got 15 minutes or so here to get through this

word processing document that I’m working. So if I’m writing along and I’m saying,

“It’s talking to me very nastily and I should be writing,” now if I stop and I

get writer’s block and I stop writing for a few seconds, it starts to go kind of psycho

on you. You’ve got different ways of having it kick in. See, now it’s turning red. It’s

getting angry. Let me just turn up my speakers. It starts playing like horror music unless

I start writing. Okay, I give. It gets you kind of writing again.

I don’t know if its conducive to the best prose being written—I’ve got to pause

it or it’s going to get angry again—but when it’s happy, it’ll give you nice—okay,

peanut butter and jelly time. When it’s happy, you can have it doing things like having

cats purr at you and give you nice backgrounds and all sorts of things. But when it’s angry,

when you’re not writing, it gets irritating, sometimes horrifically so. So Write or Die

2, if you do experience writer’s block, if you do need that little extra impetus to

get through everything as you’re doing it, it is a tool that you might consider.

Now I mentioned that I used Google Drive as my main processor. My favorite word processor

of all, one from a small company in England called Scrivener and there—sorry, the company’s

called Literature and Latte and the product is called Scrivener. It is a word processer

which—I’m just going to let the video play here just a little bit. I’ll turn down

the volume here. You can kind of see it. I don’t have it installed on this particular

computer right now but I live this as a word processor because if you are a scriptwriter,

if you are a student and you’re working on documents where you need lots organization

and structure to it, this Scrivener allows you to create kind of building blocks of whatever

work you’re working on. So here for example, each of these little

snippets of text that we see on this corkboard, they’re all editable. You can reassemble

them as you go. So if you’re writing a script, it’s great. You can have dialogue. You can

have characters. You can have all these things in these little index cards. If you’re a

student and you’re writing a paper, you can be taking notes, putting them all on these

little index cards and then assemble them later on into a word processed form.

I don’t know if I’ve done justice to it in the explanation of it right now. It’s

a fairly inexpensive word processor. I think it’s like $50 or $60 to purchase but as

far as I’m concerned, for structured writing where you’re doing a lot of research and

you’re doing a lot of massaging of the content, not for blog writing, the sort of writing

that I do nowadays where it’s just 500 words and I’m done. But if you’re writing papers,

if you’re writing scripts, if you’re writing a book, this would be the tool that I would

choose without any question. Scrivener – it’s a word processor which I think the world of.

And finally if you do the sort of writing that I do and that we all do now, we do Tweets,

we do status updates and we do short, little 200-word blog posts and incredibly long 500-word

blog posts, one of the things that suffers as a result is craftsmanship. Because I’m

writing to short length, I don’t pay as much attention to accuracy, especially around

spelling, punctuation in these short little posts. Consequently, I end up sometimes looking

a little bit less intelligent than I should because I post things before they’re ready

to be posted, with mistakes on them. So I purchased Grammarly which is software

that you buy online and it basically does online grammar and spellchecking for you.

Now it’s not very expensive. It’s $120 or so for a year, I think, is what I paid

for it. But what it’s done for me is it’s changed my process. I actually have a full

video here which I’ll create a link to. It’s changed my process. Because I purchased

this, I actually go into it and every time I’m posting anything at all, I just check

it very quickly and it goes through and it does grammar checking and spellchecking.

It also, as a bonus, does plagiarism checking which is awesome. Maybe you’ve been making

notes, maybe you’ve been clipping things off of the internet and you’ve accidentally

incorporated them into your document what somebody else is writing without you knowing

about it, it will actually tell you if it’s found it somewhere else, if it’s found those

phrases somewhere else online so that you can pay attention and either credit the original

author or rewrite it so that you don’t actually plagiarize somebody. For people who do plagiarize,

if you’re hiring somebody to do writing for you, it’s a great way for you to check

to make sure that they haven’t posted that somewhere else online as well. So it’s got

some of those nice things going for it. But for me, kind of rolling back, the benefit

is it does catch the odd grammar mistake that I make and allows me to look at it. It does

catch the odd spelling mistake but what it really does is by the fact that it comes up

with a few suggestions is it makes me stop and reread my work once before I publish it

and I found that I’m catching far more errors and my written communication is that much

more clear and that much less embarrassing as a result. So that is my fifth and last

tool that we’re going to talk about today, Grammarly.

So there we have it. Right-click your mouse on words, especially if you’re in word processor

like Google Drive, and you can check the accuracy of the words, you can check if it’s being

used properly and you can find synonyms; you can count your words overall in your document

for search engine optimization or to make sure you’re not being overly repetitive.

If you have writer’s block, Write or Die, which is a fairly dire situation; Literature

and Latte’s Scrivener, which I think is the outstanding word processor on the planet

today; and finally Grammarly, which will help you change your process especially for short,

online posts and make sure that you make less mistakes when you post online that way.

I hope you found this video to be useful. I know that I think all of these tips I use

on a fairly regular—I don’t use Write or Die yet but I might start using Write or

Die. That would be fun. I hope you found this useful and if you have, please give us a thumbs

up and don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. We would love to have you

as one of our subscribers. That means you get our videos before everybody else does,

which is simply awesome. Don’t you agree? I’m Steve Dotto. You have a great day.