Writefull

Overall Opinion: Whether you're a student working on a term paper, a professional writer, or just an individual looking to improve your writing, understanding the ins and outs of the English language is sometimes difficult. With its complicated and sometimes contradictory rules for spelling and grammar, conveying your point in an accurate and professional manner can be a challenge even for the most experienced writers. Writefull lets you convey your message with confidence and without having to worry about dumbing down your language out of concerns that your grammar or context is incorrect. The great thing about Writefull is that it can coordinate with whatever program you use to do your writing. Rather than operating as a full window-based application, Writefull is tied to a keyboard shortcut. All you have to do is highlight the text you're concerned about, hit the shortcut, and automatically get the tools you need to evaluate it. That makes it a useful tool for everything from email composition to Word documents to reading comprehension. Writefull's methodology for helping writers is actually rather clever. Writefull links to a variety of different language databases, crowdsourcing common language and literature to help you make sure your writing is more in line with standard notions of right and wrong. The tools at your disposal are pretty substantive. You can identify how often the segment of text you've selected is used in popular language, helping to prevent redundant speech. If you're trying to decide between two different sentences or phrases, you can even select both and compare them against each other to determine which is the more popular turn of phrase. Writefull also provides users with context for how these phrases are most commonly used. Sometimes we have a message we want to convey but we aren't quite pleased with the flow of the language. Writefull can take a snippet of text, highlight a specific word in it, and provide you with the most commonly used synonyms in context. You can similarly select gaps in text and see what words are typically used to fill those spaces. Writefull also offers spoken pronunciations for a wide selection of words and can translate a number of different languages into English. It uses a similarly crowdsourcing function to improve accuracy in both of these processes. A product like this - using compiled information to improve one's individual language - is naturally going to live or die on how accurate and robust their language libraries are. Writefull draws from a selection of Google databases to produce high-quality results. These include Google Books, indexed data from the Google search engine, academic papers spread across nine different languages provided by Google Scholar, and thousands of news sources culled from Google News. Google is known for their effective ability to scrape vast amounts of content from the web, providing Writefull with a wealth of resources to draw from.

Pros: The language library Writefull uses is impressively vast Quick shortcuts mean you don't have to leave the app open and running Works in any software you use to write

Cons: The foreign language library is far less robust than the native English library Requires users to be connected to the internet to use the service