Editing Tools for Writing

Here are a range of tools to use when reviewing your writing. They will allow you to consider your writing from several different perspectives.

Wordle

Wordle example
The online word cloud tool Wordle (http://www.wordle.net) measures how often words are used throughout a text and then represents the words in different sizes according to how often they have been used. The text below is from our College website. This is what it looks like when the text is pasted into Wordle.
St Patrick’s College is a Catholic secondary school for boys located in Ballarat, Victoria. The College was founded in 1893 by the Christian Brothers under the patronage of the Bishop of Ballarat, Dr James Moore. The College caters for both day and boarding students, The College is located on Sturt Street Ballarat and is part of a recognised education precinct with its close proximity to Ballarat Clarendon College, Loreto College and Ballarat High School. The aim of the College is to support parents in educating their sons within the Catholic tradition and the spirit of Edmund Rice.
 St Patrick's College maintains an inclusive enrolment policy, is generally considered a low fee school and offers a broad range of curricular and co-curricular options to cater for boys with a range of needs. This is highlighted by the wide range of options taken up by graduates ranging from tertiary studies to traineeships and apprenticeships.

Rewordify

This site can highlights the parts of speech used in sentences. Paste text into the box on the home page, click on 'parts of speech'.  You can then consider the quality of the verbs or adjectives you have used in your writing. Again we have used the text from our College website.

Rewordify example

Microsoft Word

Analyse your sentence length with good old MS Word. Using two different colours highlight alternating sentences.  We are looking for a variety of sentence lengths in creative writing - long and short, sharp sentences with medium sentences as well.

Microsoft Word example
These ideas have been sourced from the Ticking Mind blog.
Stuck for ideas? Use these sites to help kickstart your writing......