My Favorite Writing Tools

This page is a work in progress. There is much that I'd like to add.

Editing

I must have read or scanned fifty books about how to edit prose. The one that helped me the most is Joseph Williams's Style: Toward Clarity and Grace. Other editing books tell you to "write more simply and more clearly". This book shows you how to do it.

Williams has studied how our brains process language. He explains how to write sentences and paragraphs that demand the least amount of work from your readers's brains.

I've read Style from cover to cover four times in the last ten years. I'd love to write more about it at some stage. In the meantime, let me assure you that, like e-prime, Williams' book could add a golden arrow to your writer's quiver.

Thesaurus

When it comes to finding the right word, I need all the help I can get.

Paper Thesaurus
My favorite thesaurus is the Family Word Finder. It's out of print but there are lots of used copies around. I find that this book more often goes "outside the box" than other thesauri, which is often helpful in getting the right nuance.

Here are simple examples of words the Family Word Finder found for me:
- trying (for challenging)
- painless (for effortless)

Computer Thesaurus
My favorite computer-based thesaurus is Wordweb, though lately I have found the MS Word thesaurus much improved.

Translation can help you get the right word
Sometimes, when I don't find the right word, I translate the "wrong word" into German or French. Because many English words come from these languages, the translation often gives me ideas. There are many online translators. Google Translate has many language pairs, but it is far inferior to Reverso.

Dictionaries

I lost my favorite paper dictionary. It was a 1971 edition of the… I forget. I love leafing through a paper dictionary, but I've moved around so much in the last few years that I've had to move to electronic dictionaries (see below).

Software for Writers

Dictionaries
Of the many English dictionaries I've had a chance to get my hands on, here are the two I like.

First, there's the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 2nd Edition. Expensive but comprehensive. If you really want to know how a word is used, turn to OED, as it lists several examples from literature for each entry.

For a quick lookup or a question pertaining to American English, I like the Merriam Webster "Authority and Innovation".

Book Layout
For book layout and design, I use Indesign, which has displaced Quark as the industry standard. I've made a page about book layout with Indesign.

Style
Once upon a time, I used Stylewriter, a program that analyzes your text and flags potential problems. The style checker in MS Word does some of the same things, though far less extensively than Stylewriter. I no longer use Stylewriter because my style has improved (yeah!) and the software rarely flags anything useful anymore. But I was glad to have it when I first used it. Note that Stylewriter will not work on 64-bit systems unless you run it on something like Virtual PC.

Quotes about Writing

If there's one thing I hate more than writing, it's writing about writing! One of these quotes might inspire you… not to write! :)
If you have a great quote about writing, please send it through the comment form below.

If there's one thing writers love more than not writing,
it's complaining about the publishers
who are not publishing
the books they're not writing.
Anonymous Publisher

Writing is one part pleasure, three parts torture
Andy

Wishing you fun and luck with your writing projects!

With smiles and warmest regards,

Andy

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