Contests and Promotions from ResearchWritingCenter.com, Freelance Writing: Simple Tips on Complicated TopicsUseful Software for Freelance Writers by Shariq E. (Contest Finalist Submission)

Writing Contest from RWCWriting – you think it’s easy. Well… it’s not. But it can definitely be made easy. As a freelance writer you will come across a lot of different softwares; at no cost at all or on monthly trial.

You would enjoy utilizing them, while giving a flavor to your writings. In this post, I would like to mention some software that can be used to enhance your productivity and creativity, boost your vocabulary, speed up your reading, and most importantly; make your writing skills get a better writer out of you.

Communication in written form is quite popular today. Let’s say dissertations, work reports, social websites, advertisements, email or blog; all are type-written. The software that I would rate the highest in this respect is WhiteSmoke.

Working as a creative English grammar and proofreading software, it helps in improving English sentences, sharpening your prose, and making it sound more professional and innovative. It provides a quick check function and the ability to incorporate (or remove) the suggested edits at one click.

Supporting all the text-based applications, it has a set of templates for commonly written documents and a text translation feature. The best part is that it highlights and explains the errors made by the writer.

The next software in the queue is WordSmart Adult Learning Excellence, a great refresher series for adults. It includes teaching tools like sentence completions, audio pronunciations, multiple choice quizzes and word matching.

It can track your progress and advances you once you sufficiently pass the minimum criteria. Moreover, it presents a vocabulary set of 400 core words, 2,800 defined words and 10,000 pronounced words. Some words like ‘Bourgeoisie’, ‘Linnaeous’, ‘Obloquy’ and ‘Pariah’ are considered for caliber of postgraduate students.

Overall, I found WordSmart Adult Excellence easy to use and effective because you can increase your vocabulary with just ten minutes of study per day.

A freelance writer is not just into writing, he has to comprehend reading in the fastest way possible. There are people who possess a natural talent for speed reading but reading uninteresting text can slow them down.

The Reader’s Edge speed reading software has tools that can quickly enable freelance writers to skim through large volumes of text faster, while understanding and learning more.

The Reader’s Edge, created by The Literacy Company, provides speed reading training to attain a comfortable speed of reading 400 to 500 words per minute. I would say that this program is helpful to practice speedy comprehension for general purposes like reading the news or a novel by a long-winded author.

Actually, it offers exercises that are designed to help you remove the obstacles that are preventing you from reading more quickly. Furthermore, it includes oral and visual sections. For example, in the “Say it” section the words are read by a preferred coach voice and are highlighted as the words are read. This program keeps track of your progress and produces reports, and provides free updates for life.

Other than those mentioned some light software can be of great use too. For instance, Paper Rater offers utilizing the transitional phrases that can make an article flow. If you can get a paper through this with one hundred percent approval, you have a nicely diverse and grammatically corrected article.

Keynote is a free software by Tranglos that works as a research data manager. It basically helps in taking notes or outline text. By using this software a freelance content writer can organize research notes by adding multiple and variety of notes within a single file.

Similarly, Zotero is a Firefox extension that allows you to capture bibliographic information from web pages, organize citations and documents, and create bibliographies in Word and OpenOffice.

NowPublic is a Firefox extension that allows capturing and highlighting any interesting news on the web. It is easy to connect with global network of reporters, add images from extensive archive of photos and check video submitted by contributors, and instantly gets them published to blogs.

Speaking of images, Picnik is another tool that you can easily use for online photo editing such as to crop, resize, and rotate, while adding special effects too.

Luminary Writer’s Database and Sonar are online submission trackers with some social networking features, like sharing markets with other writers (and searching other writer’s shared markets). They will help you to keep updates with where you have submitted each manuscript, whether a piece has been sold or rejected and which of them are gathering dusts instead of earning their keep.

These are just a few of the software available for freelance writers. If you want your freelance writing business to grow then you should check out these software applications that could help you perform tasks more efficiently and improve your yield. That way you will work faster, probably have more fun, and be the best you can be.

About the author:
Shariq E. is a part-time freelance writer. His work has appeared in Asian newspapers and magazines such as Dawn, The Express Tribune and Sci-Tech. He maintains a telecommunication and IT related website www.zumbeel.net.

This essay was written as a submission for the Research & Writing Contest, held by the ResearchWritingCenter.com. If you want to stay updated and read other contest submissions, which became the contest finalists check back here in 1 week, when we’ll be posting another contest finalist submission!

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