Category Archives: Productivity

Working remotely? You must be able to write well

Says this Inc. article. I have been working from home (remotely) since the beginning of my professional life. The recent Covid-19 outbreak has forced the world to rethink the way everyone works. Millions of people are working from home these days. Remote work is the new normal.

The author of the above article says that “clear writing is a mark of respect”, and I couldn’t agree more. When you pay attention to your words and sentences, you are actually paying attention to the readers’ sensibilities. Your readers don’t deserve to come across lousy writing.

Agreed, the language in which you normally need to write (English for example) may not be your first language sometimes, and if you commit some oversights, that’s understandable. But some people simply don’t care even when they know how to write. They intentionally misspell or write badly structured sentences or use bad grammar. They think that using language correctly is a sign of snobbery.

When people are working remotely, communication gaps are common. You’re not talking face-to-face. You’re either using Slack, or emails or chat applications. A word missed here and there, a comma missed or misplaced here and there, and the entire meaning changes.

Some free writing tools that can be helpful

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I don’t use any writing tools. On-and-off I may have tried using some, but I always find them constraining rather than helpful. Nonetheless, they can be quite helpful to many writers who are learning the ropes.

This Fast Company blog post has reviewed some free writing tools that can help you improve your writing and take care of all those nasty mistakes that creep in while you are having a go at your creativity.

Although I don’t use writing tools, I keep an eye on the latest tools and the tools that have been evolving over the years.

Take for example Grammarly. Many years ago, when they were just launching, they gave me a free account to use and then write a review. I used it for a couple of days and then found it too interfering.

Tools like Grammarly are great for people who are still struggling with grammar and spelling and a bit of sentence formation. I’m way past those hurdles and all those peculiarities highlighted by Grammarly are just a part of my writing style.

I even purchased the Hemingway Editor – the test version – a few years ago hoping that it would help me write shorter sentences. Again, as a writer, I found it too interfering. Though, I must admit that help in turning long sentences into 2-3 shorter sentences is definitely wanted.

But then, if you’re using “than” instead of “then” and if you have gotten into the habit of using lots of passive voice (I do it sometimes) such tools are certainly helpful.

Don’t I use the editing features in MS Word and Google Docs? I definitely do. In fact, that might be the reason why I don’t use the third-party tools because the editing features in MS Word and Google Docs are enough for me.

Anyway, the tools featured in the Fast Company blog post are

Upon visiting the links, you will notice that not all are conventional writing apps. For example, LibreOffice is an open-source Office Suite just like Microsoft 365 or Google Docs. Hence, just like any Office Suite, it has a word processor, and the word processor has all the writing tools.

Similarly, Reedsy is a writing community of writers and editors. It also has a book writing tool.

“The most dangerous writing app” gives you prompts to inspire you.

Not everyone will find these writing tools obstructive. They definitely have their use.

Are online writing tools that check your grammar and writing style, any good?

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Have you ever used writing tools like Grammarly and ProWritingAid?

Even when you are working in Google Docs or MS Word, they have their own features to highlight glaring spelling and grammar mistakes.

They even advise you, just like the writing tools mentioned in the first sentence, to avoid passive voice or redundant adverbs and adjectives or to use a single word instead of multiple words for expressing something.

A couple of years ago I purchased a copy of the Hemingway app. A few weeks ago, I downloaded the latest version and tried using it for a while. The Hemingway app works just like Grammarly or ProWritingAd but in a much toned-down way. It doesn’t have advanced features like these two services. I couldn’t use it even for a single writing project.

Whether these writing tools help you or become a hindrance depends on how comfortable you are writing. They highlight common and uncommon grammar mistakes, so that’s a plus. At least when you are writing professional emails and blog posts, you won’t be committing silly grammar mistakes, which can be quite embarrassing.

These tools also make your writing crisp, or at least aspire to make your writing crisp.

By crisp I mean, often, when we are in a thought flow, we write lengthy sentences. Compound and complex sentences with lots of “and”, “or”, “but”, and so on. These writing tools advise you to create direct, shorter sentences, preferably simple sentences.

For example, the following sentence will certainly make all the writing tools go crazy.

“Seeing that the sky was overcast I decided to take my umbrella with me but just as I was stepping outside my house I saw a dog running towards me surely with an intention to attack me and therefore I ran back quickly, shut the door, put the umbrella on the side table and waited for the dog to go away, and this is why, when I started from home, the second time, I forgot to take the umbrella with me and consequently, I was drenched by the time I reached my office, only to find that the basement of the office had been flooded and all the employees were trying to rescue whatever could be rescued.”

The writing tools like Grammarly also tell you whether your writing is easier to read are not, according to various reading ease scores, with the Flesch Reading Ease score being one of the most prominent.

If you are using difficult and long words, it will suggest you use simpler and shorter words. Before evaluation, you can tell the writing tool whether you are writing something professional, academic or casual. The writing is evaluated accordingly.

Should you use writing tools that makes grammar and writing style suggestions?

You can use them if you are a beginner or if you make lots of writing mistakes when you are in the flow. For a person like me, more than a facility, they act as hindrances.

I commit grammar mistakes on rarest of the rare occasions. And even those grammar mistakes are less of grammar mistakes and more of structural choices. Sometimes I write sentences that don’t fit in the traditional “right grammar” mould.

Sometimes I use a peculiar writing style that may not fit into the conventional “proper” writing, but otherwise, there isn’t any problem in it. Hence, lots of highlights by the writing tool can be distracting.

You can certainly use writing tools to make improvements, but you don’t need to use them 100%. You can use them to point out glaring mistakes like lots of passive sentences or compound sentences or needless conjunctions.

Although I know that I should write “I did that” but sometimes I end up writing “it was done by me”, so, it can be helpful if the software highlights such things, and I can correct them.

But, are they worth the cost? Personally, I don’t think so. If you can afford them, well, why not?

Most of the writing tools are exorbitantly expensive. It might be because they are a novelty right now and the mainstream word processors aren’t shipping inbuilt tools to process language. I’m pretty sure in near future Microsoft is going to purchase one of these companies to provide writing assistance in all its Office products.

They may be helpful, or they may be a nuisance – it depends on how comfortable you are expressing yourself.

How to Write Extremely Fast and Better [infographic]

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While I’m in the process of writing a post on how different writing apps help me in content writing, Daisy from Custom Writing has sent me this infographic to publish on my blog. The title of the infographic is, 15 Ways to Write Faster.

Why there is a need to write faster?

If there is a need to write faster there might be two reasons for it:

You are actually writing very slow
There are many factors that are stopping you from writing the way you would actually write

Life these days is full of distractions. Try to write a paragraph and suddenly you will start receiving phone calls, notifications and whatnot. Even if there is no intrusion, there are so many things to occupy your mind that it’s very difficult to focus on a single task. Writing requires lots of focus and single-mindedness.

If you make your living as a content writer there is all the more reason that you should be able to write faster without compromising on quality.

If you can make good money with content writing per assignment, you can use all the time you want. But if you don’t get much you must compensate with more assignments and this requires you to write faster.

Here is the infographic:

The apps that I’m using for productivity these days

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In order to be productive (there are different definitions of productivity for different people and different situations) it is very important to track what is being accomplished and what is being delayed, and if you need to perform multiple tasks, it is very difficult to manage without making lists and without being able to mark their completion or postponement. If nothing else, marking a task as completed gives you a sense of accomplishment and you don’t feel lost by the end of the day wondering what exactly you have been doing.

Another benefit of using a calendar or a tasks list is that during the day when you feel lost and your energies seem to have been sapped, you can revisit the things that you need to do and get the focus back.

For a couple of months I used Google Calendar. In terms of looks and features it’s a minimalistic application but I could access it on my PC as well as my tablet, so it was quite convenient. Everyday at night, before switching off my computer, I would quickly enter all the things that I needed to do the next day. My only problem with Google Calendar was that my schedule is not time-based. It is tasks-based. There is nothing wrong in assigning various activities to various time zones of the day, but if – call me obsessive-compulsive – I have marked an event for 10:30 AM and if I cannot work on that event at 10:30 AM it gets on my nerves. You can create tasks in Google Calendar but they look very ugly.

Wunderlist is something that I had tried I think, a year ago, but then got distracted to something else. These days I’m using it with great regularity and in fact I’m also encouraging my daughter to prepare her tasks lists using it on her new iPad Air – solving 3 estimation problems, practicing 5-digit subtractions sums, practice singing – and she’s quite excited when she marks the tasks as done. I tried my hand at Any.do, but something is missing or I’m not comfortable with the way the tasks are managed. Although I’m not fully satisfied with Wunderlist, and

maybe I require my own app, but for the time being I’m using it everyday to create the list of tasks that I need to achieve, and it is helping me a lot to remain focused or get re-focused.

Along with Wunderlist I’m also using ToDoist, not to manage my tasks, but to manage lists, or steps. For instance, I have to work on 15 blog posts of a client. I create a new project by the name of that client and add all the titles of the blog posts to that project. Then, while working on a blog post, I mark it as light blue. So even if I’m working multiple days on a single blog post, I know on which blog post I’m working, for which client. Once the blog post is finished, the client has reviewed it and accepted it, I mark it as dark blue (this feature is present in the interface). So I know which blog posts, webpages and articles are work-in-progress for which clients, and which ones are already completed. I could have used a single application for that, either Wunderlist or ToDoist but both these apps arrange information differently, visually, so I’m using them for different objectives.

Recently I have also switched over to Word Online (One Drive) from Google Docs. I have also started using online Outlook instead of Google’s default Gmail interface to manage my email although I don’t know whether it is a progress or regress. I like the new interface and maybe I was looking for some change. Also, formatting is a bit easier in the One Drive applications with almost the same number of functions available in Google Docs.

Basically, these are the tools that I’m using these days for writing and managing my tasks.