A great resource page featuring some free and some commercial links to building other worlds, advice on writing specutive fiction and online dictionaries.Articles of The Month Archive page includes articles like Establishing the Ordinary World, Making Scenes Matter, Sympathy Without Saintliness, and Synopsis Creation: Plot Revision.
The Best of Novel Advice A most comprehensive monthly journal on the craft of writing.
Computer Adventures, The Secret Art a guide to writing computer adventure games.
Dave King Editorial Services Writing Advise link some short articles aiding in self critique.
Gospel.com How to write a Christian testimony.
How to Write a Research Paper the objective of organizing a research paper is to allow people to read your work selectively.
The Literary Zone Articles on writing, editing, and Begin Writing Fiction a free e-book covering plot characterization and point of view.
Roy Peter Clark's Twenty Writing Tools: Sentences and paragraphs, language, special effects and structure.
Top Ten Plotting Problems by Alicia Rasley. Backstory blunders, conclusions, middles, ends...
A great resource page featuring some free and some commercial links to building other worlds, advice on writing specutive fiction and online dictionaries.
Writing Center by the University of Richmond covers brainstorming, writing for specific disciplines, and the nuts and bolts of grammar, cliches, transitions...
Writing for Performance Writing Comedy by David Zucker is a structure check list for writing comedy.
Checking Out Freestanding Spell Checkers for programs that you compose text in without built in spell checkers, text editors like Tex-Edit Plus and BB Edit Lite, Apple's SimpleText, e-mail programs like Eudora Light, and HanMac Word and HX Write word processors.
Common errors in English Have a question about grammar? Check out this site.
Database of Proprietary Eponyms A quick reference for substitute words for brand names that became household words.
Editing and Rewriting Also has links to the grammar guide and principles of composition sponsored by the Capital Community College Foundation.
Garbl's Writing Center Online editorial style manual, concise Writing Guide and a awesome directory of writer's craft links.
Grammar Gorillas Practice diagraming sentences. Children's game useful for reassociating the parts of a sentence after feeling mystified about grammar rules.
The Learning Centers Electronic Handouts Contains lead sentences, proof reading marks...
Proof Reading Advice from Virginia Tech.
Wonderful Writing Skills Handbook Grammar, punctuation, types of essays, the writing process and sentence parts.
Style Writer A grammar check program that is well worth the money for the software.
AutoREALM A map making program for sci-fi and fantasy worlds. When you write a story with multiple locations it is good to be able to map it out. Once mapped out you may wish to change some of the story's details.
Flesh Java application quickly analyzes plain text and rich text files document and display the difficulty associated with comprehending it. Useful even if you use MS Word, because you don't need to go through a complete grammar check to get the readability statistics.
Poets Assistant by Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet suggests through selected poet personalities like Dickerson and Poe-- alliterations, rhymes, word sequences, and poem fragments.
Reading Rater Reading Level Checker-- just like a editor does when evaluating your copy.
Repetition Detector Cut and paste your work into program to see how many times you use a certain word. Repeated words are highlighted in text.
Roger J. Carlson Writing Help Tech Tips features MS Word macro's to edit out adverbs and overued words.
Vanessa Grant's Templates and Macros for Writers Has a useful book template for writing novels, which comes with a word check that highlights words you might want to consider revising. When on her download page when you receive a warning message from MS Word that it has received a dangerous macro, in this case say OK. Her other template Notes is as handy form to keep trac of your characters. My computer froze exiting the download page, so I copied it, pasted it to Word and saved As a template file.
Word Checker a program for checking the redundancy of words in text documents (Microsoft Word, Wordpad, and Notebook). Just copy your document into Word Checker and press Analyze.
Wurdz Analyzes frequency of words used, the word count, character count, unique words, percentage of unique words in the document, and a facility to find a particular word in a long document. Great for finding overused word that need revising. To use this freeware tool you must first save a copy of your file to txt format. Wurdz author site was offline but you can still download it.
Y-Writer Freeware that imports existing text files after you break your novel down to chapters. Helps you outline your story, and check for conflict and plot development. Allows you to then rearrange your chapters as the action unfolds. You must save your Word or RFT files as TXT files to use this program then reformat all your paragraphs if you wish to convert it back to a Word Document. Author also has a submission tracker available.
Dr. Abel Scribe Phd Guides to Research Style and Documentation are concise free guides to formatting and documenting research papers in AMA, APA, ASA, CBE, Chicago, and MLA style. The APA Web Sheet PDF and MLA Web Sheet PDF explain how to format Internet sources.
English Language Glossary A stand alone glossary to look up terms used in grammar references.
JDictionary multiplatform online dictionary that even defines those strange 3 letter words used by Scrabble players.
McGill English Dictionary of Rhyme free version just type the word you wish to rhyme in the search box. Online dictionary reference. Generates 3 columns of words.
Rhyme a rhyming dictionary program. Type in any word (it knows more than 100,000!), tell it how many syllables to match (or phonemes), and click 'Rhyme'. Generates one list but the words show up in larger print than McGill's.
Rhyme Finder 50 A dictionary of over 500 thousand rhyming words, organized by the 15 rhyming sounds and by single, double and triple vowel sounds. Includes a tutorial on rhyming poetry and a detailed index of key words.
TheSage's English Dictionary and Thesaurus is a professional freeware package that integrates a complete dictionary and a multifaceted thesaurus.
Speller (for Windows®) Type an approximate spelling of a word and Speller displays a list of similar sounding words. Copy a word from the list to the clipboard, then paste it into other applications.
Mobysaurus Windows English thesaurus packed with synonyms, powered by Moby Thesaurus II, Roget's Thesaurus, Collaborative International Dictionary of English, and WordNet
Thinking Man's Thesaurus Thesaurus and related word prompter works with the 16 bit version of Word Web or by itself. It's an oldie but I still refer to it when I'm hard up for the perfect word.
Waffle Magic Ever have a minor character that talks jargon? Waffle Magic lists expression after expression from the business world.
Yadabyte Dictionary Choose word from a list. Portable means you can save it on usb drive and run it without installing the program on a hard drive.
Win Thesaurus uses the Moby Thesaurus data for its roots and synonyms. Has 30,260 root words and phrases, and over 2.5 million synonyms.
Woody's VBA Power Tools Popup Thesaurus Menu gives you quick and easy right-click access to synonyms as opposed to getting the same thesaurus from the MS Word menu bar, alternative word meanings, and antonyms from within any Microsoft Word for Windows 97 document instead of going to the top of Word's menu bar. Fontlist displays how the fonts look before you check them.
WordNet Freeware Dictionary/Thesaurus with advanced search features, including wildcard, regular expression, anagram, scrabble and sounds like.
WordWeb the free version is a very nice thesaurus that works well with MS Word 97, MS Word 2000 and Rough Draft.
XTerm Medical Dictionary Easy to use application that includes a search engine with wildcard and incorrect spelling searches. The database of medical terms is updated twice a month and the software features a function to easily download and add these updates.
Someone else reading your work out-loud can ensnare some of the most deviously hidden mistakes.
D Speech Converts text into clear voice. The defalt sounds like a deep voiced male who can read incredibly fast or slow. Downloadable alternate voices.
NaturalReader is a software that converts any text into clear, high-quality voice. The voice used in the free version sounds robotic, but almost every word is understandable.
Ink Byte Tracker a tool to help writers manage the submission of their work to publishers, agents, journals, or any other markets.
Sonar a Windows manuscript submission tracking program for short storys. A handy way to track which market has which story, whether a story's been sold or rejected and how long its been on the editors desk.
Writer's Data Base a program for keeping track of where you sent your manuscript. Works on Windows but it seems like a DOS program.
WinSam a manuscript tracking program for Windows and DOS. Website also has a link for a manuscript tracking program for Macs.
