February, 2014
Today I am sharing with you two interesting web tools and one iPad app that have been shared with me sometime now but never had the time to review them till last weekend. These are basically tools that you can use with your students in class to help them hone in their writing skill and improve their style:
1- Hemingway
This is a great tool for analyzing students writings. Hemingway highlights long and complex sentences and common errors. It also use different code colours to show you the areas in your writing that you need to work on , for instance if you see a yellow highlight, shorten the sentence or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic. Phrases in green have been marked to show passive voice and adverbs are helpfully shown in blue. Get rid of them and pick verbs with force instead.
2- StoryToolz
StoryToolz provides you with a set of tools to work on your stories. Story Idea for instance generates starters to use in your stories, Cliche Buster allows you to find the instantiations of cliches in your passages. Other tools that StroyToolz provide include : Readability, Word Count meter, Random Conflicts, and many more.
3- Phraseology
Phraseology is an iPad app for writing. A simple environment which makes it enjoyable to write on the iPad – but also supports you with tools that help to improve your writing. Some of the feature Phraseology offers to its users include :
- Simple editing environment and lightweight document manager that do not distract from the task at hand.
- Extended keyboard with undo, cursor and selection manipulation functions.
- iCloud sync and backup.
- Link to a Dropbox account and maintain a full version history of document modification.
- Live character and word counts.
- High quality fonts and customizable font size.
- TextExpander Touch support.
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