Whatever our crafts may be, we all need to have the necessary tools to help us not just to get things done, but to get it done right.

To become a good writer, having a good vocabulary and imagination is never enough; you should have great patience, talent, ideas, endless practice, and perfect tools. So in this featured article, I'm presenting you 10 tools every enthusiastic writer should have.


Merriam Webster Online

The America's primary and most reliable distributor of language information, in print and online, for more than a century. Merriam Webster is approved by professional dictionary editors and writers in America.

Aside from the word etymology, and definition, the online version of Merriam Webster has an audio pronunciation, so you could hear how the word is actually pronounced. If you're the type who love writing while travelling, you can now download the app to your mobile for free.


Dragon NaturallySpeaking

A speech recognition software to help you write documents, search the web and compose email faster than when you type. Dragon’s newest version is now capable of learning the words and phrases you use the most, and you can also let the software dictate your writing when proofreading.

Hands tied to overwhelming tasks? When you feel that you have too much on your hands literally, Dragon is your friend! The tool is a gem to every serial multi-tasker, you can now answer an email while working on another task.


FastPencil

An online publishing tool allowing authors and individual publishers to create books ready for printing and in EPUB format ready for online distribution, and in local bookstores in partnership with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IngramSpark, and others. FastPencil also has a collaboration capability that made it possible for you and your friends to have an easy access when collaborating.

FastPencil is a very reliable tool if you're an emerging writer on a tight budget. For established authors, it also helps them to have an innovative way on how they can distribute their books.


Diigo

A bookmarking tool that allows registered users to bookmark a website, it gives users the ability to leave actual notes or highlight words on the live site that you bookmarked. Aside from the web pages, Diigo also allows you to annotate Articles, PDFs or Screenshots.

Diigo can be extremely valuable when proofreading your draft or even your final Ebook; it's like you're highlighting or adding notes to an actual paper or book. It gives you the feels of annotating a note in an old-fashioned way.


Pressbooks

You can write, import or edit an existing manuscript, and choose a book design theme using Pressbooks, a book production software. You also have the option to send sample chapters to your social media accounts and book reviews for free to promote your material. The software also helps generate print-ready files compatible with CreateSpace and IngramSpark.

Whether you don’t have the talent or the time to design your Ebook, Pressbooks will take care of the graphic design and coding on your behalf; you can just pick a book theme that best suits your material.


ProWritingAid

An online editing application that will completely help you change the way you write and become more efficient. ProWritingAid helps you detect spelling, grammar, and simple punctuation errors. It also has the ability to identify overused words to help you produce a unique composition.

There are an abundant grammar checkers and editing software available on the internet, but ProWritingAid claims that they are the only software that integrates with MS Word, Open Office, Google Docs, Scrivener and Google Chrome so can easily edit whatever you're working on.


Visuwords

A modern dictionary that offers an interactive and innovative way of learning the language. Visuwords' derived from the word visual, as it exercises visual learning. It's good that they made sure the application is user-friendly, you just need to type whatever word is on your mind, and you can easily understand the result with the use of the legend provided.

Visuwords is unquestionably a great tool for a writer. If you're a thesaurus devotee, this online application could be a good friend to you. If you search a word, the result will present a graph that shows different terms and a connecting line indicating if the synonyms actually convey the same idea of what you're trying to express.


Bubbl.us

A web-based software that basically helps people or groups have an organized visualization of ideas during brainstorming. Bubbl.us can assist you to construct a graphical presentation of your mind-map, create a book outline, and design a process that can be saved in a cloud storage and shared with the collaborators.

Writers have lots of thoughts and ideas that constantly change in just a short period of time, and Bubbl.us is here to help you control the chaos. The software works on all platforms, for both desktop and mobile. You don't have to download anything and it will never consume your disk space.


Copyscape

A plagiarism checker that helps verify if the content of the article that you acquire is not stolen from other websites. Copyscape can detect if somebody's stealing your content, but if you desire an automatic plagiarism alert and a thorough search to make sure that nobody's copying your content, you may try signing-up to one of their services, Copysentry.

Writers invest almost everything when composing a great content, they are worthy of the recognition they deserve and to not get robbed by a plagiarist. Technology made it possible for people to easily copy any content from the internet; good thing it's the same medium that can hinder it.


Scrivener

A comprehensive digital studio for writers that puts everything you need from writing, structuring, editing, proofreading, to printing. Scrivener gives the writer full authority for formatting, but you also have the option to let Scrivener redesign your draft after you're done so you can spend more time on words rather than the format.

Scrivener is one of the most popular software used by various writers, from best-selling and aspiring authors to movie scriptwriters, and utilized even by students, and professors who are working on a case study.



It's grand to be breathing in this era where you can have almost every tool you need that can help mold and bring out the greatest version of yourself. We should always take advantage of what we have now, but we must never forget the classic approach on how we make things possible before these technologies emerged.

So what are your top tools on the list? My top 3 would be Scrivener, Merriam Webster Online, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Join me and let's start a discussion! Don't forget to share the other tools you think would be beneficial to our writers out there. :)