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Communications Technology Writing

Writing About Writing

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Recently, I’ve been working on a few different writing projects. Only 15 days in to October, I’ve written more than 60,000 words this month. That’s six times the length of my dissertation. Wowza.

In writing so much I have come across a couple of tools that have transformed the way I work and the way I edit my work. These are Writer Pro and Poetica.

Beginning with Writer Pro, this professional writing software is genius. Firstly, it offers a full screen mode that’s hard to exit. This keeps all kinds of Buzzfeed/Twitter/Pinterest procrastinating at bay. There’s only a single blank screen in front of you. That is all.

Another great thing about Writer Pro is that it highlights syntax, the various parts of a sentence. I find this incredibly useful as I’m guilty of writing in lists and using a lot of adjectives. Although I have this self-awareness, it’s not enough to stop me from doing it. But Writer pro stops me. It pulls out all adjectives in bold and reveals, in a painfully obvious and shameful way, every adjective.

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In addition to syntax monitoring, Writer Pro counts characters, sentence and words. But if like me, you don’t want to character count until you’re finished, you can hide these figures until you want to see them.

Moving on to Poetica, this tool comes with a small disclaimer. I know the Poetica team very well. However this does not affect how I feel about the product in the slightest because it’s so useful and I’d tell them if it wasn’t. I also wouldn’t write about it if it wasn’t useful. So that settles that.

Poetica is like a better version of Google docs. You can use the platform to write, share your work and edit from anywhere. Poetica is highly collaborative so multiple people can contribute to editing a piece of work. I can ask for feedback from my editor when I’m finished a section and he will then be prompted through email to edit the document.

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Poetica is intuitive. The way that you would correct text or add in additional words looks just like it would if you were writing on a piece of paper analog style, rather than rigid and digital. Lines have curves, comments are speech bubbles and words can get added in with squiggles, instead lines and text boxes used in other editing tools. Poetica also has a really nice interface so even the harshest feedback looks pretty.

If you’re working on any writing projects, give Writer Pro and Poetica a test run. At the very least, you’ll have a great user experience.

2 replies on “Writing About Writing”

Katee- such useful tips- thanks for sharing- I need to scroll through your blog posts to find more of this. happy typing!

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