Hi there! My name is Margo, and I am a professional content creator. Today I will share a list of tools that help me in boosting my writing on an everyday basis.

For a non-native speaker like me, English grammar is the most tricky part when it comes to writing. Sure, I study it all along, but it is always a good idea to cover your back with a specialized tool. If content creation is your job, it is clear that no free tool can be sufficiently effective — lesson learned from personal experience.

After lots of experiments, I’ve chosen the Textly.AI grammar checker. It effectively fights typos — my biggest problem as I type fast. Also, it fixes grammar mistakes and works as a super convenient Chrome extension. If I need to fix a blog post on WordPress or Medium, there is no need in copying and pasting the content, everything is checked on the fly.

Chrome extension generates writing suggestions in real-time

The Textly web app has file storage, personal dictionary where you don’t want the tool to highlight an error, and an online editor. It is not WYSIWYG, you don’t get any formatting. However, there is a content assessment module which evaluates readability and complexity of your text. For example, I often notice that unconsciously try to write too complex sentences which look more solid — which is a common mistake of non-natives — and the software tells me when I am going too far on this.

Sure, there is Grammarly — I tried it, but it turned out to be too expensive: I don’t want to pay $30/mo or $140 per year in one payment for a grammar checking software. My choice is $36 for the quarterly plan for Textly.AI. Also, I can’t say that I like everything about data collection and privacy of Grammarly (here is a nice discussion on the topic). Even, this tool pretends to be smarter than it actually is. For example, it hates a passive voice so much, that sometimes ends up switching the phrase “The car was parked by the sidewalk” to “The sidewalk parked the car.”

Anyway, you can’t rely too much on automated grammar checking tools. Even the best software in the world can’t substitute the human editor for now.

There are websites for rapid proofreading like Fluent Express. However, they won’t be a good fit for content creation professionals and writers. Although it is handy to have a tool, you can run your text through to get it fixed by a real person, and the most effective proofreading happens when an editor and writer have worked together for a long time. Both of you should know each other’s style and language preferences. This is when not only basic proofreading happens, but text becomes a better product.

To find such team members and colleagues, I use Upwork. It is a website where freelancers can find jobs, and one of its categories is connected to writing. Here you can find thousands of many languages native speakers including English. Many of them are professional linguists and editors. That is, it is easy to find an experienced editor with a degree in linguistics whose specialization is Australian or New Zealand English.

Several job postings on Upwork allowed me to find great freelancers who are now my editorial team. We work together for around two years.

Due to a high competition at the platform, freelancers have to set up affordable prices — you can get a standard blog post to proofread for about $10–20. The main advantage that a person will edit your piece with a publicly available profile and reviews, whom you can message at any time, not a no-name proofreader from Fluent Express.

You can discuss edits, negotiate future discounts, explain your idea behind any part of the text — shortly speaking; you definitely need Upwork for professional content creation. Moreover, it can be used for multiple languages. For example, recently I’ve ordered their translations to Spanish and Mandarin.

Vocabulary.com

Although I am writing content every day, sometimes I get stuck at some words meanings of which I do not know exactly or just do not remember. In such cases, I use Vocabulary.com to double check myself. I’ve found this website several months ago and completely happy with it. The main idea behind it is that the tool is how it shows the meaning of the word. It is like a teacher explaining a new notion to a student.

Also, on the same page, you can see the use cases of a specific word with examples, spot connected words. You even can take a short quiz on the word’s meaning. As a result, you will remember the meaning very fast, so this tool not only useful for content creators, but students as well.

A bit questionable choice, but I can explain. Though this service is really overhyped thanks to its founders be PR and media relations experts who were able to land mentions in some top media outlets like Forbes or Techcrunch, the tool can be useful.

I’ve seen lots of best writing enhancement tools collections where HemingwayApp was considered as an alternative to grammar checking software like Grammarly. It is not. The only thing this tool is suitable for is mastering the style of your text. This system only shows problems like too wordy sentences, passive voice or bad language constructions, but offer no solutions.

Thus, the tool can help only those who have already gained some experience in content creation and can interpret advice the system gives. Or, you can bundle Hemingway with a human editor from Upwork, who will review the recommendations, tell you where and how to apply and reject them. For me, this option showed the maximum efficiency.

This service is aimed at translation. Sometimes I need to review content in languages other than English to prepare the perfect piece. In such cases, Deepl is the best. The system uses an enormous database of human-created translations to train its algorithms. As a result, they able to translate text close to native speaker speech accounting the word order, instead of translating words one by one and generating, say, Spanish sentence written in English.

I used the free version of the service, and its functionality is impressive. For example, if you change a specific word in a final translated text, the system will reconstruct the sentence to make it look as native as possible. In the beginning, I was skeptical about smart translation services; however, after a couple of weeks using Deepl, it became physically unpleasant to visit Google Translate page.

Final thoughts

As it is often said at the end of such posts, no writing assistant can substitute human. That is true, but my experience shows that using new technologies and smart tools may save you tons of time and resources. And you still can find a human proofreader to run a final check, not writing the whole text from scratch.