There are two main types of writers nowadays. One that writes for academic purposes, the other that does it for online platforms, such as a blogger. Now, a blog writer needs 2000+ words to make any significant impact.
Whereas a student needs to work hard to stay out of the 95% of students who have plagiarized at least once during academic years. These are some reasons that writing and AI-based tools go hand-in-hand nowadays.
So, which of such tools need a place in your writing strategy? Let’s explore a few essential things and then talk about the best tools writers can employ in their strategies.
What Is A Writing Strategy?
A writing strategy is a way to plan, organize and execute your tasks. It can be used for various purposes, such as improving productivity, organizing your thoughts, and improving your skills.
A good writing strategy will help you stay focused on what you’re doing by putting the right amount of pressure on you. It will also help you maintain the quality of your work by keeping distractions at bay.
Writing strategies are not easy to develop, but they are worth it in the long run because they can save time and improve productivity. However, you can break down the writing strategy into three main parts to improve your skills:
Research
Research is the central pillar of any good writing strategy. The more you know about your subject or topic, the easier it will be for you to formulate content according to it. Therefore, most good writing strategies today rely more on research.
Quality
The quality of the content can be described in various elements, such as:
- Grammatical quality, i.e., correctness, punctuation, spelling prowess
- Easy-to-read sentences and paragraphing
- Informative value
- Formatting and structure
These are some of the most common and necessary aspects of good quality content. Once again, these remain constant regardless of your writing type, i.e., academic or blog.
Integrity
The integrity of content also depends on a few things, but it’s not about writing good sentences or grammatical corrections. Instead, it depends on other elements that make up the soul of any content, such as:
- Good content tone & voice
- Plagiarism-free text
- Originality, i.e., unique topics and delivery
Therefore, integral content is yet another product of a good writing strategy.
Why Are Writing Skills Important?
Let’s analyze today’s situation when people are always looking for good content. The internet is full of information, but it can be hard to find the correct information. People want to know what they need to know, and they want it now.
With so many content sources out there, your content must stand out from the rest. Some people believe that writing skills are not essential in today’s world because everything is done online and on screens.
But this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, writing skills are more critical than ever before. Because you have to be able to write well in order to convey your message effectively online or on a screen.
On the other hand, if you’re an academic looking to advance in academic credibility, you need good writing skills. But what exactly are writing skills? How do you distinguish them? Here are three main pillars of good writing strategies:
Formulation
Content formulation and creation are two of the essential aspects of any writing-related process today. Whether you talk about SEO content or academic papers, the writer who knows how to formulate it correctly advances in their walk of life. So, these strategies include:
- Picking the right topics
- Formulating the right headlines
- Writing text-book perfect introductions
- More than impressive content body
- Mind-changing conclusion
These few content formulation principles remain constant regardless of your writing field.
Credibility
A writer’s credibility depends on two things. One is research, and the other is the ability to provide informative value. For a blog writer, the goal is to teach something to the reader once they’re done scrolling through an article.
For an academic writer, the goal is to write something that changes the mind of a professional or a teacher. In both cases, principles are simple, but the rules of the game change. That’s why achieving higher credibility is one of the reasons writing skills are important.
Elevation
Elevation or advancement in their respective walks of life is another reason writers need a strategy that improves their skills. To keep it simple, here are two scenarios:
- Academic writers hope to achieve better grades with better writing
- Professional/blog writers hope to achieve better SEO ranks and promotions through good content
So, polishing writing skills through a writing strategy is perhaps the only way to guarantee these two scenarios of success for both types of writers.
How Should Writers Form Strategies?
Writers should focus on research and quality. They should make sure that their content is original and free from errors. The primary goal of a writer is to create content that engages readers and provides them with useful information.
Therefore, writers should always be on the lookout for new trends in the industry. Specifically, what their readers are looking for. However, the life of an academic writer is vastly different. So, let’s break down an idea of formulating a strategy for both these types of writers:
For Students
Students or academic writers should focus on research and learning a lot. Since the goal of any academic essay or paper is to elevate a student’s knowledge, the more they know about a topic, the easier it will be for them to write. So, here’s what a step-by-step strategy would look like:
- Research and analyses of the topic
- Subject outline
- Introduction writing
- Body writing
- Conclusion
- Summary writing
- Plagiarism/grammar check
Employing this tactic will save a lot of time and increase productivity.
For SEO Writers Â
Professional or SEO writers will need to have a slightly different strategy, such as:
- Research and subject understanding
- Blog outline
- Introduction writing
- Writing H2 and H3s
- Adding backlinks
- Ensuring grammatical quality
- Finding and removing plagiarism
- Metadata
As you can see, there are similarities between these two strategies. However, the goal and their desired platform are vastly different. Therefore, a professional writer should always abide by this tactic.
Are Tools Really Important To Raise Writing Skills & Strategy?
Before we get into the bulk of our topic, let’s establish something important: are tools really necessary to improve writing skills and create writing strategies? Since we know the requirements, why do we need tools to help us with that? Here are a few reasons:
- Tools help us save time
- They can improve the quality of content
- Tools improve efficiency and productivity
- Tools make tedious tasks easier
- Tools help write more
- Seamlessly find and remove plagiarism
- Effectively fix grammatical errors
These reasons indicate one thing: the role of AI in today’s writing. All the tools we’ll be talking about today don’t only provide these benefits/reasons to the writer. Still, they also make the process a lot easier.
What once took minutes and hours to do, AI-based tools make it easier to do and take less than a few minutes. For instance, finding plagiarism was one of the dullest & dreary processes of writing. Nowadays, it only takes a program to help us analyze the exact percentage of duplicity in any text.
5 Best Tools That Will Help Improve Writing Strategy
Now that we’ve established all the necessities of writing, strategies, and the role of AI tools, let’s talk about our best picks. These tools are supposed to make it easier for writers, which include:
- Finding plagiarism
- Rewriting or revamping content
- Making content easier to read
- Improving grammatical quality
- Improve efficiency and save time
Bearing these things in mind, here are our picks for 5 best tools that’ll help you improve your writing strategy:
1.   Paraphraser
Paraphraser.io is one of the leading rephrases available today. The team behind this tool knows their business, and implementing the AI in this paraphraser makes it worth your time—and certainly deserves a spot in your writing strategy.
But first, let’s talk about the UI:
1: These are various content tones you can pick, but creative is only available in the paid version
2: This is what you use to upload the file, but you can simply copy and paste your content
3: This is where you’ll see your paraphrased text
The UI keeps it simple, but that’s not the reason we picked this tool. You can implement it in your strategy in various ways:
- Improve content’s quality
- Shift or change your writing’s tone
- Remove plagiarism (Check tool number 2)
These are some of the common benefits. But, here’s a demonstration of how this tool works:
As you can see here, the tool has altered our content without shifting the meaning—which is what a paraphrasing tool is supposed to do. However, the flow and natural content tone make it an ideal companion for any writer today.
2.   Plagiarism checker
There are rarely any writers today that don’t know PrePostSEO. And one of the main reasons behind that is their plagiarism checker. This content scanner has become one of the fundamental essentials in academic or professional writers’ arsenal.
For your convenience, here are a few key features:
- 1000-word limit
- Access to vast databases
- Quick scanning abilities
- Plagiarism percentage
- Source locator
On top of that, it features an easy UI design:
And once you scan your content, here’s how it shows you plagiarism:
1: Percentage of plagiarized content
2: Percentage of unique content (0% in this case)
3: Location/source of the original text
Therefore, this tool doesn’t only make it easier for a writer to scan for plagiarism but also helps them analyze the exact amount of duplicity.
On top of that, you can locate the source and use it as a citation to avoid plagiarism. This proves it’s an essential tool to help you find and remove plagiarism, making it a vital part of any writing strategy.
3.   Hemmingway Editor
Hemingway Editor is named after one of the most influential and significant writers of all time. So, there’s no wonder it’s one of the best tools writers can use today. But where exactly does it belong in a writing echelon? Here’s what it does:
- The readability index shows us exactly how readable our text is. The aim is to reach for 8 or higher.
- Suggestions, which tell us exactly the type of changes to make and ensure our content reads better
That’s precisely why you need it in your writing strategy, to improve your text and make it more readable.
4.   Grammarly
Grammarly is the leading name in grammar correction. Therefore, it’s our fourth pick for writers to employ in their text. But, what exactly does it do?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you must have seen Grammarly being mentioned in most writing communities. But, here’s what you need to know:
- Number of changes suggested by the tool
- The overall reading score (90 or higher is ideal)
- Specific/individual suggestions
Adding this tool to your shed will make your writing strategy stronger and prone to writing outstanding content. Hence why hundreds of thousands of writers use it every day.
5.   Google Docs
Google Docs is one of the finest word processors/rich text editors. It is one of the primary options for many writers after MS Word. But why should you prefer it over the latter? Here are a few reasons:
- Auto save to Google Drive
- Easy to collaborate with other writers
- In-built OCR tools
- Inbuilt grammar checker
Besides that, it’s a full-blown rich text editor with rich features and is free. So, all you need is a Google account. The bottom line is that you need this in your writing strategy to improve productivity and efficiency. And, saving your content online also gives your text security.
Conclusion
These are some of the best tools writers can employ. In this article, we tried to answer some burning questions, including the necessity of tools in a writer’s life. Therefore, we hope this helps writers in all facets of life and helps them improve their writing tactics.
Markus lives in San Francisco, California and is the video game and audio expert on Good e-Reader! He has a huge interest in new e-readers and tablets, and gaming.