Some Useful Reading and Writing Tools

In The Writing Meme, I had mentioned about using the right tools. Here are a few tools I’ve recently found.

Improve Readability

Readability is a bookmarklet you can add to your browser toolbar to make web pages easy to read. For example, here is Thomas Friedman, with all the clutter of the NYTimes site:

Friedman on NYT

Here is the same page with Readability:

Friedman with Readability

TidyRead is very similar to Readability, but offers an ‘Option Bar’ at the top, where you can change display settings at will – this makes it very convenient and easy to use:

Friedman with TidyRead

Practice Speed Reading

If you’re serious about improving your reading speed, check out Eyercize. Their Reading Pacer is essentially a tachistoscope, and will help improve your offline (book) reading speed as well.

Free Online PDF to Word Converter

PDFToWord is a really cool site, when you want to easily convert PDF documents to word for editing. It retains all the formatting, tables, graphics, links, etc. making it quite indispensable if you often use both PDF and Word file formats. Oh, and you should have the Save as PDF extension to Office 2007.

Text Analysis Tools

There are a few shareware programs for analyzing text in terms of word counts, word frequency, etc. It is not-so-easy to find truly free programs, so here are a couple of options:

Text Statistics Generator is a bare-bones tool, giving you quick analysis of number of word occurrences. Here is the CPI(M) manifesto for the 2009 elections analyzed:

Text Statistics

The excellent UsingEnglish.com site has an Advanced Text Analyzer, which I think is more useful. The caveat: to use the advanced features, you have to be a registered member of their site (registration is free).

UsingEnglish CPIM Summary

Here’s the CPI(M) Manifesto word cloud:

UsingEnglish CPIM WordCloud

Why use text analyzers? Website designers using SEO techniques need to identify keywords that they can use to maximize site traffic and ad revenue. The SEO philosophy is use targeted keywords as frequently as you can to improve your search engine rankings.

As a writer, I find these tools useful the other way around. Often, I find myself overusing a word in an article. Word frequency analysis can help identify which words and phrases you’re overusing in your writing. Maybe that’s the time you need a thesaurus!

If you find any of these tools useful, or have other ones to share, please feel free to comment.

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Related posts:

  1. The Writing Meme
  2. Classifying a Blog’s Writing Style
  3. Writing for MakeUseOf.com
  4. Styles of Composition — Writing

March 19, 2009 – 8:20 PM | By Mahendra | Posted in Writing, blogging, technology | Tagged , , , , | Comments (15)

15 Comments

  • Final_Transit wrote:
    Mar 19, 2009 at 10:14 PM

    That’s a pretty exhaus­tive list of tools! Thanks!
    I used read­abil­ity once, but now that blogs are more con­sis­tent, its easy to ignore unwanted stuff:)

  • Nita wrote:
    Mar 20, 2009 at 9:14 PM

    Good to see you on your blog Mahen­dra! And looks like you are doing some read­ing on the web! :) Need to check out these tools.
    btw, I think your com­ment no. 2 is a spam comment.

  • Nita wrote:
    Mar 20, 2009 at 9:15 PM

    It’s funny but that com­ment has now come last and though my com­ment was no 3 it’s gone to no 1 !

  • Richard wrote:
    Mar 26, 2009 at 8:24 AM

    Mahen­dra, thanks for fea­tur­ing our new PDF-to-Word con­ver­sion ser­vice on your site. Much appre­ci­ated! That ‘Read­abil­ity’ book­marklet is a great find too.

  • amreekandesi wrote:
    Mar 26, 2009 at 9:55 AM

    Regard­ing web­page read­abil­ity, many sites offer a print­able ver­sion of the page. That is one handy fea­ture, one that i use a lot.

    Will try out these applications…these sound very helpful.

  • Wordle US & Indian Constitution, Congress & CPI(M) Manifesto « An Unquiet Mind wrote:
    Mar 31, 2009 at 7:06 PM

    […] had ear­lier men­tioned Text Analy­sis Tools, but Wor­dle makes it sim­pler and more fun than ever […]

  • Vikas Gupta wrote:
    Apr 8, 2009 at 11:14 AM

    Very use­ful! I will surely see the archives sooner than later now! I love IT tips and you are in this field since quite some time! Adding you in my links page! :)

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Mar 21, 2009 at 11:33 AM

    Noth­ing exhaus­tive about it really! Thanks for the feedback.

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Mar 21, 2009 at 11:34 AM

    Yeah, feels good to breathe the air in the blo­gos­phere again! :-)

    I know I’ve missed out a lot of great posts from all you great blog­gers out there…

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Mar 21, 2009 at 11:36 AM

    It was not exactly spam but not exactly a per­sonal com­ment either — it was an ‘ack’ from one of the tools I men­tioned above — any­way I’ve deleted it.

    As for the sequenc­ing, I’ve set newer com­ments to come up on top, so less ver­ti­cal scroll-down is required. I hope that is a bet­ter way to go about it, though it may need some unlearn­ing from every­one used to the newer-at-bottom style.

  • Final_Transit wrote:
    Mar 23, 2009 at 6:27 PM

    This sys­tem is good for some­one who is read­ing your post for the first time. Its also good for some­one who likes to com­ment with­out read­ing what oth­ers have said. How­ever, return­ing vis­i­tors would like to know the sto­ry­line and that can­not be told in reverse sequenc­ing! :)

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Mar 23, 2009 at 7:07 PM

    Hmm…looks like I might have to revert! You are right. Let me think about it.

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Mar 28, 2009 at 9:05 PM

    Hi Richard, thanks for the com­ment, and thanks for mak­ing such a great ser­vice free!

  • Mahendra wrote:
    Apr 8, 2009 at 1:08 PM

    Thank you Vikas!