Four Helpful Tools for Freelance Writers

In recent years, demand, met by advances in both technology and social media, have made pursuing a career as a freelance writer possible for millions of aspiring writers. Many writers choose to carve their humble beginnings on websites such as Triond, Bukisa, Helium, and Associated Content, but remain unaware of the number of free tools that are avaiable to help them produce high quality content.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a free website with a plethora of awesome features for writers. Grammarly points out common mistakes in English grammar including punctuation, spelling, and sentence structure. Anyone may sign up for the site to receive free and more comprehensive reports on their projects. The only apparent downside to using Grammarly is that review reports are not able to be viewed in full on netbooks with 10″ or smaller screens.

Open Office

Open Office is a popular choice for text editing and office solutions. It is also an excellent alternative to Microsoft Office. With Open Office, users can create documents and save them in a variety of formats such as .HTML, .DOC, and more. This handy program even offers the option to save documents in Adobe .PDF format, although Open Office cannot edit current .PDF documents or merge files using the .PDF format into one file. There are many free programs available online to combine these types of documents, but most are trial versions with limited capability. The best program that I have discovered offering a time-limited trial is Nitro PDF. Unlike Adobe, it consumes less system resources and retails for approximately
$100.

Word Count

Word Count Tool is a website that features a free word counting tool for those who are not using a word processing tool with an available word count feature. Simply cut and paste a block of text onto the website’s main page and it will tally up the  number of words. The site does NOT include strings of numbers, HTML tags, or words beginning with apostrophes and hyphens as words.

Carbonmade

Carbonmade is a cute, but professional website that offers users a FREE opportunity to build an online portfolio highlighting up to five individual projects.

The list of helpful tools available to freelance writers is endless and these four highlighted tools and websites have assistedmany writers in their endeavors.