Being able to communicate effectively is a vital skill for success in today’s world. When sharing your thoughts, opinions, and responses in writing, the last thing you want is for your message to be overshadowed by silly grammar mistakes or poor structure.
Your writing needs to be precise, clear, correct, easily understood, and laid out in an aesthetically pleasing way. This is where writing assistant software comes in.
Whether you’re trying to compose an email, write a book, craft a social media post, or nail down a blog post, there are tons of writing software out there that can help.
However, you don’t have to go through the trouble of tracking them all down to find the most suitable one for you and your budget. I’ve handpicked some of the best writing software that are completely free to use and guaranteed to take your writing to the next level.
Best Free Writing Assistant Software
1. LibreOffice
Every writer needs a suite of tools to help them accomplish various tasks and LibreOffice is one of the best options out there. Think of it as the free, open-source, swankier alternative to Microsoft Office.
LibreOffice functions as a word processing app with multi-language dictionaries, a thesaurus, and a comprehensive library of editing tools. It’s compatible with Linux, Windows, and MacOS devices and provides support for a variety of plugins.
Whether you want to write memos or create and design complete books with diagrams, indexes, and robust content, LibreOffice is up to the task. You can just focus on crafting your message and LibreOffice will handle the task of ensuring it looks great and reads well.
There is a wide range of document templates for you to choose from in LibreOffice. It also features spreadsheets, databases, and can be used to express mathematical formulas.
LibreOffice offers a user-friendly interface that blends style with function. To expand the software’s capabilities, you can add other features like additional language packs, enhanced accessibility options, and advanced grammar tools.
2. Zoho Writer
If you took MS Word, Google Docs, Airtable, and Grammarly and rolled them up together, Zoho Writer is what you’ll get. It’s everything you need to get your writing work done efficiently.
Zoho Writer lets you collaborate with other writers and teammates on a single document. It tracks every collaborator’s activities so you can see exactly how they engaged with the file.
You can leave personal notes to yourself on drafts that can only be seen by you. Alternatively, you can adjust controls and access so only specific people can view the comments you make on a document.
Zoho Writer is a great tool for formatting your text and expressing your thoughts more clearly. There are tons of document templates to choose from, which can drastically reduce the time you spend doing paperwork from scratch.
The program also allows you to view and edit several pages at once. You can find out what stage of the workflow your article or document is in real-time, saving you the trouble of constantly checking in with other collaborators or team members.
3. Dynalist
A key part of writing is being able to organize your thoughts and ideas in a coherent manner. Dynalist is a tool that’s designed to help you do that efficiently.
It helps you create outlines of blog posts, book chapters, and essays before you begin writing them so you know exactly which points you want to address in your draft. Dynalist also promotes collaborating and sharing.
This is particularly useful for people who work in cross-functional roles and organizations. You can easily create a mind map of the content you want to produce and share it with another writer or member of the team.
Dynalist allows you to group relevant outlines together to make them easier to find. You can add notes to your outlines to highlight important supplementary information that you don’t want to forget.
It can also serve as a to-do list tool to help you stay on top of all your outstanding tasks and give you a defined timeframe for accomplishing them.
Dynalist is a perfect tool for people interested in cultivating an organized writing practice. The platform is easily accessible via the web and is also compatible with desktop, Android, and iOS devices, with dedicated apps for each.
4. Grammarly
Another free writing assistant software that’s great to have in your arsenal is Grammarly. It saves you from those dreadful and embarrassing moments after you hit publish and realize there’s a bunch of errors in your post.
With Grammarly, there’s no room for misspellings, missing punctuations, awkwardly framed sentences, and other grammatical errors. All you have to do is install the relevant browser extension and Grammarly will proofread everything you write online or offline.
It also shows suggestions of how you can improve your sentence structures to make them more comprehensible. Grammarly can check your writing and tell you how your tone comes across—friendly, optimistic, informative, cautionary, uncertain, formal, etc.
Unlike traditional editors that only underline the errors in your work, Grammarly goes the extra mile by offering a detailed reason for every suggestion it makes. This way, you’ll be able to see what you did wrong and avoid making the same mistakes in the future.
In addition to these corrections, Grammarly provides a number of features to help you make the most of your writing. You can set down goals based on the tone, formality level, and audience type for which each piece of content is intended.
If you want to ensure your text is free of plagiarism, Grammarly also provides a plagiarism checking function that you can use to enhance the quality of your writing.
Fixing grammar, spellings, style, tone is no more a task. Grammarly does it all at the click of a button. For smooth writing and brilliant communication, trust Grammarly!
5. Scribus
If you create magazines/books or are interested in self-publishing, this writing assistant software could really come in handy. Scribus is an open source desktop publishing tool that helps you beautifully design how you present your words because what you say matters as much as how you say it.
It provides professional-level publishing support with various features for typesetting, document presentation, layout, color management, and more. You can even use Scribus to make vector drawings or create forms and PDF files.
Scribus has a user-friendly interface. If you’ve played around with InDesign, you’ll find that their outlook is quite similar, so it shouldn’t be difficult for you to figure out how Scribus works.
In addition, Scribus offers support for documentation creation applications such as Lilypond and LaText. The program allows you to export and import a large number of files without any issues.
Although Scribus is ideal for designing books, you can also use it to create and style posters, journals, newsletters, ebooks, infographics, white papers, case studies, and other document types.
Scribus supports Linux, Windows, MacOS, OpenBSD, Haiku, Solaris, NetBSD, and PC-BSD platforms.
6. ProWritingAid
ProWritingAid is a writing software built for writers by writers. It focuses on resolving issues such as structure, grammatical errors, and pronoun use that prevent you from unlocking your full writing potential.
Rather than simply providing suggestions, ProWritingAid supplies you with the tools to better understand the changes you’re making. It explains your mistakes to you so that you can avoid repeating them.
It provides over a dozen reports analyzing various factors in your text including sticky sentences, repeated words, transition words, and readability. You can set personalized editing and writing goals that align with your overall purpose and mission.
ProWritingAid also provides a detailed overview of your writing from style to tone and common mistakes that you make. It’ll tell you which words you overuse, which areas you need to work on, and how seamlessly you connect your thoughts.
You can find this comprehensive breakdown in your Summary Report along with suggestions on how to polish your writing skills.
With this tool, you don’t need to manually skim through your writing for superfluous words and grammatical errors. ProWritingAid does all the work for you by scanning through the copy in just a few seconds.
It also offers a powerful style editor that can help you find better replacements for weak phrases or overused words. ProWritingAid can simplify your sentence construction to improve readability and eliminate redundancies or cliches.
Now take your writing to the next level. ProWritingAid offers a robust grammar tool together with an easy to use style-editor, reports, articles, videos, quizzes and more!
7. Readable
Readable is a word processing tool and editor that helps you analyze and improve the readability of your prose. It then provides a score based on how readable the text is or would be for the average person.
This software comes with a bunch of helpful features that writers, especially those who want comprehensive textual analysis might find particularly useful. It identifies and points out signals of verbose prose like run-on sentences.
It will also help you test for grammar and spelling. You can use Readable to check the quality of your text before sending it out into the world.
Readable gathers lots of relevant statistics about your writing from reading time to the composition of the text. It’ll also show you how your text scores on various readability scales including Gunning Fog, Automated Readability Index, and Flesch-Kincaid.
It uses factors like average sentence length, familiarity of words, syllable count, average word length, and complexity of sentences to determine your readability score.
Readable lets you share websites, text, and file scores. It’s completely free for use via the web. You just have to paste in your text and Readable will check its reading ease and help you make it more accessible to the general public.
8. Ginger
Founded in 2008, Ginger is one of the oldest writing assistance tools around. It uses natural language processing algorithms to understand the context in your copy and find errors in convoluted areas.
It will pick up common and rare grammatical errors such as wording, sentence structuring, writing style, punctuation, misspelled words, and subject-verb agreement.
With Ginger, you can fix all the errors in a single click and undo all the changes at once if you want. You can switch between different versions of the English language depending on the one you write in.
For users who speak or write in a foreign language or who consider English as a secondary language, Ginger supports translation for German, French, Spanish, and more.
You can feed your text into the Ginger software and it’ll convert it into English and analyze it for errors.
Another great feature that sets Ginger apart from most other writing and editing apps is that it can be linked to your Gmail inbox and social media profiles. So you can achieve utmost accuracy in your emails and social media posts while typing in real time.
Ginger is a cross-platform tool, meaning that you can use it on your desktop, Android, or iOS devices.
9. Hemmingway Editor
If you want a tool that improves your writing and ensures you pass across your message clearly and engagingly, the Hemmingway Editor is worth a shot. The software is inspired by the acclaimed writer, Earnest Hemingway who was known for his ability to communicate a lot in just a few sentences.
The Hemingway Editor helps you accomplish the same thing by cutting out unnecessary words and phrases in your writing. All you have to do is paste the content you’ve written into the editor and it’ll tidy up your thoughts.
Hemmingway will offer suggestions for improving the quality of your sentences by removing tautology and cutting down on the use of adverbs. It will show you simpler sentences that you can use to replace convoluted ones for better clarity of expression.
The tool will also suggest rewriting particular sentences so that it goes from passive to active voice. If you’re the kind of writer who tends to get carried away with run-on sentences, don’t worry, Hemmingway is going to help you with that.
It’ll highlight long blocks of text so you can split or shorten them to make them more readable. This way, you can bring down your word count without omitting any important points from your text.
In addition, Hemmingway Editor gives your text a grade indicating how readable your writing is. The lower the reading grade or level, the more accessible your message will be to the average person, allowing you to reach a bigger audience.
10. Author
As the name suggests, Author helps you write better. It’s a tool that lets you create a mind map and write at the same time without disrupting your workflow.
Author lets you connect the things you learn or the ideas you have by allowing you to integrate new ideas/knowledge with existing ones. You can create notes and define concepts as you encounter them in your research.
As a result, you’ll be more intentional in crafting a narrative that addresses all the key points you want to speak on. It’ll also make it easier for you to quickly relate to a given section of your essay, novel, or report.
Author’s automatic glossary feature can save you a lot of time by creating and formatting references, citations, and endnotes. This makes it a great tool for writing academic papers and other documents that require a clearly defined structure.
You can instantly scour the web, translate foreign or unknown words, and convert numbers from right within the tool. To top it off, Author features a fantastic design that prioritizes ease and functionality.
However, Author is only available on MacOS devices at the moment.
Also Read: Best Paraphrasing Tools
11. NaturalReader
It’s very easy to miss errors and other issues with your text when editing it yourself. This is because you usually end up reading the words the way you intended to write them in your head, not the way they actually are.
NaturalReader’s core mission is to make self-editing easier and more accurate by converting your text to speech and reading it out to you. This way, you get fresh eyes and ears on your work, making it easier to identify issues with your writing.
You can catch typos, poor punctuation, awkward phrasing, and wonky sentences easily and correct them. To use NaturalReader, simply paste your draft into the text box, select your preferred reading speed and voice, then let your eyes follow the magnified text.
NaturalReader allows you to rewind, pause, fast-forward, or even adjust the speech-to-text setting at any time. It’s available via the web, as well as on Windows and Mac systems.
12. De-Jargonizer
Let’s say you work in a highly technical field and you’re trying to write an article or research paper that you expect to be read by people both in and out of your field.
The industry-specific words you use might be easy for people in a similar field to grasp, but everyone else is going to have a difficult time understanding your point.
This is where De-Jargonizer comes in. It’s a writing tool that helps rid your copy of jargon that can alienate or confuse your audience. This way, your message can reach a wider audience and resonate with them.
De-Jargonizer analyzes your text and identifies words or phrases that could be construed as jargon to anyone outside of your industry. You can then replace these words with others that will be easier to comprehend or provide a definition for them.
Although De-Jargonizer’s interface looks a bit dated, it’s still pretty easy to use. All you have to do is upload your draft or copy and paste the text into the tool to get started.
De-Jargonizer’s algorithm will thoroughly examine your prose and highlight words that might be potentially problematic to readers. Depending on how technical or severe the jargon is, the offending word will be highlighted in red or orange.
Your text will also be scored based on how suitable it is for general audiences. The higher the score, the more accessible your writing is. And if you get a low score, it’s time to cut out the jargon and adjust your vocabulary to suit a variety of audiences.
13. Reedsy
Reedsy is another great writing tool for authors who want a focus-intensive interface to work on their book without distractions. It allows you to carry out professional-grade typesetting and design an exceptional book while keeping costs at a minimum.
With Reedsy, you can proofread and structure your novel or book and export them in publishing-ready ebook formats like PDF. As you write, Reedsy will edit your draft and format it so it’s ready for distribution when you’re done.
This comprehensive writing software also comes with content marketing advantages as well for those who need a little help with their manuscript.
You can find and hire professional editors, cover designers, publishers, marketers, and ghostwriters from the Reedsy talent pipeline.
Reedsy is completely free to use. You just have to register on the platform with your email address to get started.
14. Wordtune
When it comes to content repurposing and reconstruction, Wordtune is one of the best writing software out there. Unlike other writing tools that are powered by artificial intelligence, Wordtune attempts to understand the semantics and context of what you’ve written.
It then uses various language models to phrase sentences in a different way so their meaning is clearer and more compelling. With Wordtune, you don’t have to settle for content that’s just okay.
You can take things a step further and ensure your message is easily consumable and engaging. Wordtune employs standard AI tools with deep-learning-based natural language processing technology to paraphrase your writing.
Rather than focusing on correcting your grammar, Wordtune aims to enhance the overall readability of your writing while preserving the intended meaning.
Other incredible features the tool provides include a multi-language word finder and real-time suggestions based on thesauruses. It also gives you control over the style and length of your sentences and it integrates easily with various business tools and social platforms.
15. LanguageTool
LanguageTool is a proofreader, grammar, and style checker rolled into one service. It can analyze any website or document, detect the language it’s written in, then highlight any errors in the copy.
Whether you’re a writer, teacher, student, or a professional looking to improve what and how they write, LanguageTool is there to help. It suggests changes in style, spelling, and grammar to boost writing quality and comprehension.
This powerful software supports more than 25 languages including Spanish, French, German, and English. LanguageTool also scores the quality of your prose and offers suggestions to improve upon it.
It features a browser add-on that you can install to allow LanguageTool to proofread your text while you’re composing emails, tweets, or blog posts. You don’t have to worry about your privacy being invaded because it prevents the browser add-on from gathering and storing any data.
There are also add-ons for Microsoft Word and Google Docs to enable you to write clearly and precisely when using these platforms.
Also Read: Resoomer Review
Conclusion
The right software can take a lot of the stress out of writing for you so you can just focus on what you do best instead of worrying about editing, proofreading, or formatting.
Adding any of the apps and tools we’ve discussed to your writer’s chest can boost your productivity and help you create content that resonates with your audience. However, if pressed, I’ll have to give the edge to Ginger over all the others.
It does an excellent job of helping you refine your writing and making the content creation process a little more fun.
Scott L. Macarthur is a marketing consultant and an online author. He is mostly engaged in providing his expertise to startups and SMBs. He is also an author on TheNextWeb.