While becoming too reliant on online tools is unhealthy for writers, taking benefits from them in an assistive capacity is highly recommended and helpful. There are some needlessly long processes that online tools can make a lot quicker. And there are likewise needlessly difficult processes that online tools can make a lot easier.
If you don’t know which tools these are and what they can be useful for, don’t worry. That is what we’ll be clearing up in this post.
The Best and Essential AI Tools for Every Writer
1. ChatGPT
A strange way to start off this list, but hear us out. Nowadays, a lot of people have started using ChatGPT as a content generator which it technically is. However, the way ChatGPT is treated as a replacement for content writers is totally off the mark.
ChatGPT is not a replacement for content writers. It is a tool for them. And quite an important one at that there is a lot of stuff that writers can do with ChatGPT Online to get help in the overall writing process. It can be used to create content titles, outlines, prompts, and the like. Once the content has been written, it can also be used to check the quality to get improvement suggestions.
Using ChatGPT is a risky business for writers since there is a fine line between getting help from it and becoming dangerously reliant on it. Should the conversations become one-sided, i.e., with you entering the prompts and it giving you the content that you use verbatim, it indicates the point where you have to watch yourself. Using AI-generated content is not bad or prohibited in theory, but as a writer, it does step upon the creativity and originality you’re expected to show.
In a nutshell, here are some ways in which ChatGPT can prove to be a useful tool for writers:
- It can help you understand concepts and topics that you have trouble with
- It can help you create topics and their outlines easily
- It can help you evaluate your content and find helpful suggestions for improving it
OpenAI has developed the official ChatGPT App for Android and iOS devices. Users can download the ChatGPT App from the official Google Play store and Apple App Store.
2. Grammarly
Let’s move on to the next one. Grammarly is a popular tool that almost every writer nowadays is familiar with. It is a grammar-checking tool that checks content for spelling and grammar issues while proffering the correct suggestions for them.
While there are many other similar tools available online for the same purpose, there are some things that make Grammarly a choice worth picking. For example,
- It is free to use (albeit with some limitations for the free users)
- It is available as an online tool, as a browser extension, and as a system extension
- It explains all the errors that it points out to make the overall experience helpful and educative
- It is available for the different dialects/styles of English i.e., UK English, US English, etc.
Using a grammar checker in the first place is important for writers since it helps them improve the overall quality of their content. Grammar and spelling errors can go a long way to wreck the first impressions of your content by making it look amateurish. In other words, if someone starts reading a piece of content just to find it riddled with grammar and spelling errors (even if it is just at the start), they would automatically develop a negative perception of it.
3. Paraphraser
Paraphraser is, as the name gives away, an online paraphrasing tool. Initially, it may sound a bit strange to mention a paraphrasing tool as a must-have for content writers. But there are a lot of ways in which tools like this can be helpful. We’ll talk about a couple of those before moving on to discuss the tool itself.
The first way in which paraphrasing tools can be helpful is by helping writers tone down the redundancy and repetition in their content. For instance, if there is a particular piece of content that has the same words repeated over and over again, using a paraphrasing tool on it can be a good remedy. Since the tool would paraphrase the content and swap out the overly-used words with other suitable alternatives, the redundancy would automatically be eliminated.
Similarly, if there are any other fluency issues in the content, other than redundancy, they can be fixed when paraphrased with a smart paraphrasing tool. In a nutshell, paraphrasing tools can just be a good way to improve the quality of existing content by making different types of changes to it.
Moving on to the tool itself, Paraphraser is free to use (partially), and it has smart AI-based functionality. It offers multiple modes that users can choose from to paraphrase their content differently.
There are different options and features that users can utilize before and after the paraphrasing process. For example, the tool allows you to upload files from your local storage before you start paraphrasing, and then it allows you to download the stuff back when you’re done.
To sum it up, some of the pros of this tool are as follows:
- It can be used without any paid plans or subscriptions (to a certain extent)
- It has a smart, AI-backed working that allows it to give smart results
- It has multiple modes (some of which are only for paid users) that you can choose from however you want
4. Hemingway Editor
Readability is a factor that writers have to be very careful of when creating content. Should their content lack readability, it can be hard for their readers to understand and also for the SEs to effectively crawl. Yep, that’s true.
Search engines read the content published by a source to see how helpful it is and how they should rank it. If a particular website throws readability out of the window and publishes content that goes like this:
The rudimentary elucidation of the acronym SEO commences with the elaboration that it stands for search engine optimization in full.
…it won’t be ranked really high because it is not helpful.
On the other hand, if another website does the same thing albeit with better readability, their content could appear like this:
To begin, SEO stands for search engine optimization.
…it would automatically be better received since it is so much clearer.
In a nutshell, readability is important. The Hemingway Editor is essentially an online tool that helps you manage the readability level of your content. You can provide it with your content, which it gives a grade to on a scale of 1 to “post-graduate.” “1” means grade 1 readability i.e., that the content can be read by first graders.
There are different factors that Hemingway checks in the given content to grade its readability. For example,
- It looks for long sentences and marks them yellow
- It looks for really long and complicated sentences and marks them red
- It looks for uses of passive voice and colors them all green
- It also highlights hard words and highlights them purple
- The same goes for adverbs. It highlights them all in blue
Other than highlighting these issues, Hemingway also lets you fix them right within the tool itself. On top of being a readability checker, Hemingway is also a text editor i.e., it offers different formatting and styling options.
Conclusion
There is a glut of tools available on the Internet that can help writers out in a whole bunch of different ways. We’ve mentioned a few basic and popular ones above. You can, by all means, look for alternatives other than the tools we’ve mentioned above in the same categories i.e., Paraphrasers, grammar checkers, readability checkers, etc. But if you go with our picks, you’ll be able to use them without any worries about performance and data security.