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Try these 6 Free Online Text Editors to Improve Your Writing

Online text editors are excellent tools you can use to check grammar and fine-tune your writing. Being an author and blogger, I know how important it is to make my books and posts error-free. A composition full of mistakes cannot please anyone. Today, many online and offline text editors are available to help writers check their text.   In the past few months, I’ve tried several such tools. Honestly, very few pleased me. This post is about the ones I found useful. But before I begin, I must state that all these online text editors work with the English language. So, if you write in any other language, these won’t be useful for you.

Best Free Online Text Editors

Online grammar checker and text editors

Sentence Checkup:

This is a simple online tool to check the spelling and grammar of your text. You just type or copy/paste your text in the white box and click on the Checkup button. You have the option to check according to American English or British English. The default option is just English.
When you press the Checkup button, the online tool underlines the errors in red. It performs a basic spell-checking and sentence construction checking. The spelling checker is all right. However, its ability to recognize commonly confused words is not very good. While it recognized there/their, it did not notice sole/soul, one/won.
 

What I liked about this tool is its suggestions for tightening the sentences by pointing out unnecessary words. Like it suggested MANY is enough, instead of MANY DIFFERENT. My text contained a sentence ‘BUT THERE IS NO ONE TO LISTEN TO ME NOW.’ The tool suggested removing TO ME. The suggestion makes perfect sense. Similarly, in the sentence I HEARD THE SOUND OF SOBBING COMING FROM THAT ROOM, it suggested the removal of THE SOUND OF. Again, it makes sense. Though I’d need to change the sentence a bit more if I accept this suggestion. Five words saved in one small paragraph. The tool also works well at pointing out missing or unnecessary determiners (a, an, the).

As this is an online tool, it is more suitable for checking shorter text. However, there is no text limit. So, you can use it to check even novels, one chapter at a time.

Grammarly online text editor

Grammarly – online grammar checker:

Grammarly is the most popular spell and grammar checker. One reason for its popularity is that we can use it as an online checker, MS Office Add-on, or a desktop app for Windows. It also has Chrome and Microsoft Edge extensions that add its functionality to emails, social media messages, etc. Grammarly is available in free and paid versions.

Grammarly finds more errors than any other online text editor I’ve tried. However, it is far from perfect. I have not tried the paid version, but the free version has a lot of scope for improvement. When I tried it, it did not recognize commonly confused words like soul/sole. It did not recognize unnecessary words like the Sentence Checkup tool did. Nor did it even notice I’ve used VERY twice in a single sentence. It also gave several false positives.

However, it can prove timesaving by weeding out many mistakes and typos. Its Thesaurus feature can be a great help too. Just double-click on a word and Grammarly shows you its relevant synonyms. Also, when you use the Grammarly browser extension, it points out the mistakes as you type in emails or social media posts. This can prove helpful in saving you from embarrassing typos.

ProWritingAid – awesome online text editor for creative writers

While the Sentence Checkup website is ideal for quickly checking short text and Grammarly is great for checking grammar, ProWritingAid is more suitable for creative writers like authors, copywriters, etc. Along with the grammar check, it also examines the text for writing style. It provides reports for grammar, style, overused words, cliches, sticky sentences, sentence length variation, word consistency, pronoun, alliteration, etc. It is available as an online editor, desktop app, and can also integrate with word processors like MS Office, OpenOffice, and Google Docs.

ProWritingAid is available in Free and Premium versions. Unlike Grammarly, PWA does not limit features in the free version. You can access all its reports for free. The only limit is that you can only check 500 words at a time for free. But you can do this as many times as you want.

(Another similar Editor is AutoCrit. It is an excellent and capable online editor. However, several of its features are blocked for free accounts)

Hemmingway online text editor

Hemmingway App:

Sentence Checkup is best for checking sentence construction and weeding out unnecessary words. Grammarly is good for checking the spelling and grammar of your work. The Hemmingway App helps in improving your writing style. It highlights adverbs, passive voice, phrases with simpler alternatives, and hard to read sentences. It also tells you whether your use of adverbs and passive voice is within the advisable limits or not. And also shows the Readability Grade of the text, reading time, and word count, etc.

Hemmingway online text editor is simple to use and has a clean user interface. You can write on it or copy-paste the text on its editor. It automatically highlights the mistakes in different colours. Also, it has text formatting options like Bold, Italics, Bullets, Headings, and Link.

Hemmingway also has a Desktop app for offline use. It is a paid software that includes features like HTML editing, export to MS Word, Save as PDF with Hemmingway highlights, publish directly to WordPress & Medium, etc.

Slick Write – a powerful online text editor:

This online editor has more features than the editors mentioned above. It can check for spelling mistakes, adverbs, unnecessary words, simile, misplaced conjunction, repetitive words, wordy or redundant phrases, complex/simple sentences. It can show structural/sentence length/word length flow and document statistics. Not all these features are selected by default. But you can go into settings and select the options you want.

Slick Write is a competent Editor, but not perfect. It too missed some commonly confused words. And its mistake underlines will sometimes make you scratch your head, trying to understand why the word is a mistake. Even NOT gets underlined as an adverb. It points out all possible mistakes, without caring for the context. But overall, it works well.

One thing I dislike about Slick Write is that the Critique and Editing features are separate. The critique shows you mistakes but you must switch to the Editing to remove that mistake. The Editing space shows no underlines, so you must find that mistake yourself. And then switch back to Critique to see the next mistake. Then switch back to editing to remove it. And so on. It’s weird and irritating.

MS Word:

I know this is not an online tool, though it too has its online app. But I’m talking about the offline program that most of us use. We must not ignore the spelling and grammar checking abilities of the good old MS Word. The newer versions of MS Word are quite good at weeding out mistakes. I have a subscription of Office 365. MS Word 365 is frequently updated. In just a year, I’ve seen several improvements in its checking abilities. Also, if you dig deep into the Setting of the Editor, you can further enhance its abilities. Click at Editor’s Settings, then open the Settings next to Writing Style. In these settings, you can choose all the mistakes you want MS Word to check. Make sure you have chosen Grammar and Refinements in the Writing Style box. The refinements include checking for clarity and conciseness, punctuation conventions, and Vocabulary Choice.

Update:

Recently, I also learnt of another similar website https://grammark.org. I tried it a little and found it easy to use and useful. You can check this website too.

Which text editor I use?

For a long time, I relied on MS Word only. But since I’ve discovered these wonderful online text editors, I use a combination of them to make sure my text is error-free. For my blog posts, I mostly rely on Grammarly. But for my books, I use Grammarly, Sentence Checkup, and ProWritingAid. Finally, I check the text on MS Office using the Read Aloud feature. I use the free version of Grammarly and Premium version of ProWritingAid. All these are awesome online text editors. However, I never trust any of these tools blindly. They are not perfect. Sometimes they will miss even the basic mistakes. Sometimes, their correction suggestions are ridiculous.
 
Pro Tip:

Over the years, I’ve listed up a few words that crop in too often into my text and are mostly unnecessary. I use MS Word to highlight all these words in my text, and then I edit them out one by one. Here’s my list of words to watch out for: Very, Really, But, That, Then, Than, She, Adverbs (words ending in ly), of (to reduce passive voice), not, shouldn’t, couldn’t, can’t (to reduce negative, encourages the use of powerful verbs), in order to, start to, Gerunds (words ending in ing), was/were, Has, had (indicate passive voice), yeah, very, just, so, however. Avoid starting your sentences with There is, There are, There were.

Don’t know how to highlight all instances of a word in MS Word? It’s simple. Open the Replace utility (Ctrl + H), type the word in ‘Find what’ and ‘Replace with’ fields. Click the Format button near the bottom and select Highlight. Then, click the Highlight button on the MS Word ribbon and select the highlight colour. Now on the Replace toolbox, click Replace All. This works for me and should work for you too.

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