5 Tested tools to write better content

I came to Canada in 2015 and since then I am learning a lot about this amazing country. And it was a shock when I found out there are no Grammar lessons at school, they learn grammar by writing and reading. This explains a lot why there are so many mistakes in the comment section of social media.

I learned English when I was a teenager, I studied for 7 years, then I stopped. I thought it was enough. Then 10 years later, I had to study for the IELTS and wow! I was in trouble. I studied using a book named Ace the IELTS and it helped me a lot. In the end, I got a 7.0 in 9.0, so not that bad. No class prepared me to speak in a foreign country, the first week I thought I would never going to make it. Every sentence I heard took me at least 3 seconds to process, and more than often I inserted a word in Portuguese in the middle. I always thought people might think I was stupid or something, then I met this Russian guy who told me to not worry, it was just a sound. A weird sound in the middle of a sentence.

Even if speaking in English was not my forte at the time, my writing skills were good enough and I made my way through it.

YOU DON'T NEED TO WRITE PERFECTLY TO WRITE BLOG POSTS. MOST PEOPLE DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT THIS

I love to read and the more I read in English, the more I get better at writing and speaking. I made a promise to myself when I moved to Canada: No more translated books if I could help it, if the original language is English, this is how I would read it.

This is probably not your reality, you probably were born in an English country but maybe you feel that your writing skills are not good enough to write good content. Don’t worry, there are good manuals around and everybody writes. And that’s the name of the book I recommend first.

"IF YOU HAVE A WEBSITE, YOU ARE A PUBLISHER. IF YOU ARE ON SOCIAL MEDIA, YOU ARE IN MARKETING. AND THAT MEANS WE ARE ALL WRITERS."

I can’t stress enough about how this book is important to me. I have a shelf on the top of my desk and this book is there and I often get it to consult. Ann Handley does such a great job with this book. It’s divided into 6 parts, and the way she writes makes everything so light.

art 1: Writing rules: How to write better (and how to hating writing less)

Part 2: Writing rules: Grammar and usage

Part 3: Story Rules

Part 4: Publishing Rules

Part 5: 13 things marketers write

Part 6: Content tools

Bonus books: I read these two books in Portuguese, however, the lessons I learned were so valuable, they are by far my favourite books in writing and creative thinking.

Writing down the bones by Natalie Goldberg (here). I love how passionate she is, she says to write better you need to write more, write bad stuff until it gets good. You don't need to show off your bad writing. It's the same with anything new we learn in life, you need to practice and practice to be better.

The other one is A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative by Roger von Oech (here). This book if a full class of how to think outside of any box, you have to think like a crazy person and then make sense out of it.

TOOLS TO WRITE BETTER CONTENT

Pro Writing Aid Editing Tool // A free tool that finds all the mistakes on your text and gives you solutions on style, repetitions, overused, readability, cliches, echoes, sentence length. There is a premium account that gives you a Chrome extension, it edits where you write (good for mac and windows users) and there is no word count. It’s only $50 a year and I think it’s a steal.

Weava // It has a weird name but I don’t know how I lived my life as a blogger without this. It’s a Chrome extension where you can highlight your researches in the color of your preference. It saves and organizes by color in one place.

Notion // A google docs in steroids, endless pages, text, images, calendar. I use Notion to decide things like the title, put a checklist of everything I need, the links, the images. It’s my organization tool. Notion is free forever.

Answer the Public // This one is probably one of those underrated websites people don't want to give away their secrets. It's the best resource to find out what to write about and how to write about it. Just drop a subject and the website will compile a mind map of the questions people ask about that topic. All you have to do is choose some and write the answers. It's like someone did the hard work for you. No need to sign up for Quora and see what people are asking there (unfortunately only 3 free searches a day).

Do you have a favourite tool?