By Spencer Riley | Updated on
Writing is a multi-faceted process that includes brainstorming, research, writing, revision, editing, and publishing. Writing is something we all have to do at some point in our lives, and even if your scripting efforts center more on notes for the milkman than chapters and verses for the masses, you'll find an app here to meet your needs.
Writing is about more than putting pen to paper. With these additional writing apps, you can get feedback on your writing, learn to be a better writer, find agents and markets, and even explore self-publishing opportunities.
What constitutes the best app for writers depends on their process, genre, and conditions in which they are most productive. Additionally, it depends on what they intend to do with the finished work: publish it online, send it to an agent, or shoot a film.
There is no single best app for all writers, but there are plenty of excellent writing apps that cater to different needs, work styles, and genres.These writing apps for iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux put your words into the right format, adding polish and professionalism to your creations.
Evernote is an incredibly useful app for writers who need to organize their ideas and make sense of their thoughts. Writers use Evernote in a variety of ways. The main way it is used is to write down ideas, take random notes, and notes from interviews- even the beginning of the article starts in Evernote. There are many other useful features of Evernote that writers take advantage of snapping web clips, taking photos and audio recordings are also features that come in handy for writers.
Using Evernote's web clipper, you can capture full articles online in a couple of clicks. The articles are then added to Evernote where you can organize collected research into different notebooks, read the full text of articles you've saved, search all of your collected research at once, and share your collected research with others.
Basically, when the writer begins to write, it all starts in Evernote. Even the simplest idea may turn into a huge article so the writer will input this idea into Evernote.
Best for:Writing and Editing process with multiple projects
Devices: iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Web
Price: Free; Premium: $7.99 per month or Evernote Business: $14.99 per user per month
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Writer is one of the best apps for authors who are struggling with their creativity and need some assistance in generating ideas. It is a freemium Android writing app. The app is fantastic for on-the-go editing and writing novels on a smartphone or a tablet. It makes writing to be as basic as possible making it easier for users to turn their thoughts into text.
For now, Writer saves your created documents in your flash drives or SD cards or any other external storage devices but future versions will be able to save the writing on cloud and will also allow for synchronization by the use of Dropbox. It’s a clean, no-fuss space to write, store it and view some simple stats like word count and estimated reading time.
Like Ulysses, it also has support for Markdown – so take the chance to get familiar with that very handy text format if you’re not already.
Best fordistraction-free writing
Devices: Android, Web browser
Price: Free, or $11 per month, or $18 per user, per month
iA Writer is the best free apps for writers for either plain text or Markdown. If you’ve ever found word processor apps to be distracting, give iA Writer a try. It eliminates nearly all the distractions found in word processing apps to help you focus on the text. The app supports typing in Markdown for basic formatting, although there are some built-in buttons for adding bold, italics, and the like if you're more comfortable doing it that way.
Recordings & Photos are built into the note and can be made any time - you can take notes & photos while recording or while playing, and you can pause/resume to add new recording sections to an existing recording.But the purpose of Writer is to facilitate writing, and its setup clearly reflects that a -boon for distraction-prone and clutter-averse writers.
Best forWriters who prefer simplicity over style
Devices: iOS, Android, macOS, Windows
Price: Free, or $29.99/$49.99
A simple, versatile, and refined word processor, Scrivener will make an indelible mark on your writing process. As a writing tool, you might expect Scrivener to provide a number of word-processing features, and you’d be right. The app does allow you to type, edit and format words in ways you’re familiar with.
Scrivener is one of the best apps for writers because it was built to give them the tools they need to draft ideas, compose words, edit, organize, and output their works. It's inexpensive, and the fact that you can install it on multiple machines adds value because you can work on your writing from any computer or iOS device with the app.
When writing a long document, it can be helpful and motivating to keep track of your progress. Knowing at a glance which parts of a document have been finished gives you a sense of progress, and makes sure that nothing slips through the cracks.
What strikes me about Scrivener is how much more it looks like typical office software than other writing apps do. Menus, buttons, view modes, formatting tools, statistics, annotations, labels, keywords, uploads, and so forth.
Best for Novelists and other long-form writers who want an elaborate, organized interface
Devices: iOS, macOS, Windows
Price: 30-day free trial, or $45 license for the full version
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JotterPad is the next-generation plain text editor engineered for Creative writing. It is perfect for writing novels, lyrics, poems, essays, drafts, and screenplays. The clean typing interface allows you to focus on writing and shaping your thoughts into text. Dive into your work without having any distractions and write to your hearts’ content.
It is good for writing a thesis, lyrics, articles, dissertations, and other creative writings. The app has a built-in English dictionary and a distraction-free user interface that makes it more suitable for writing. It has a Dropbox integration that works even when you are offline. It saves your work automatically on your exit to avoid the loss of files left unsaved.
Best for Distraction-free Screenwriting
Devices: iOS, Android, macOS, Windows
Price: Free, or $6.99 per month
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Ulysses is a complete writing environment for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. It’s designed to make writing as pleasant as possible and provide all of the tools a writer may need.Ulysses has a clean, modern interface designed to keep you comfortable and focused during long writing sessions.
The app allows me to focus on the content I’m creating rather than the interface I’m creating it in. Dark mode, typewriter mode, fullscreen mode and minimal mode all help with this.For technical writing, Ulysses provides code blocks with syntax highlighting.
Ulysses has an excellent publishing feature that’s quite easy to use. It will let you publish directly to WordPress and Medium, either as a published post or as a draft. It will let you export to Microsoft Word so your proofreaders and editors can work on your document with track changes enabled. And it will allow you to export to a whole range of other useful formats, including PDF, HTML, ePub, Markdown, and RTF.
Best forComprehensive set of writing features
Devices:iOS, macOS
Price:14-day free trial; $5.99 per month
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Grammarly is the writing world’s go-to spelling and grammar checker outside of standard word processors. Like any good editor, it underlines the errors and weak phrases in your writing - but Grammarly also goes above and beyond by providing a label and detailed reason for each correction, so you’ll actually learn from your mistakes.So if you write a ton of emails, Grammarly could be perfect for you! But if you write books, you might benefit more from the tools to follow.
Grammarly is the go-to app for writers of all kinds, used every day by best-selling novelists, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, students, academics, lawyers, journalists, translators, and more.
But when the accuracy and effectiveness of your writing really count, Grammarly offers genuine peace of mind. Grammarly is all about correcting and improving your writing.
Best for Writers who want to carefully check short pieces, such as articles and emails
Devices: iOS, Android, macOS, Windows
Price: Free, Premium plan starting $12 per month
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If you are a desktop or a PC user, you must be familiar with Microsoft Word. Microsoft has developed a mobile application that is compatible with IOS and Android. This writing app is free for all users, and this has made it a top choice for many mobile users. The app is integrated with Dropbox to enable uploading of the documents created. Its interface is almost similar to that of PC making it easier for PC users to use it.
With this app, you are able to create, view edit, and share your documents with friends, colleagues, and family that could have been created with a PC no matter where you are.
Best forLong-form writers hoping to hone their personal style
Devices:iOS, Android, Windows
Price:Free, or $6.99 per month
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No matter what kind of content you are writing, whether it is novels or short-form blogs, your content quality needs to be top-notch for it to attract readers. Thankfully, writers today are blessed with the almighty power of technology and bequeathed with some of the most fascinating writing tools in the market.
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