Ever find yourself with a burning grammatical question whilst away from your desk? Or need to settle a linguistic debate, such as whether to hyphenate coordinate?
If so, help is at hand courtesy of a new writers’ app from London-based writing and brand language consultancy The Writer. Offering “Writerly advice on matters of (linguistic) style”, The Writer’s style guide is available for free on iPhones and Android devices.
Addressing a growing need
With content marketing a high priority for many businesses – and set to stay that way for the foreseeable – business writing is higher on the agenda than ever before. Much of that content is created in real time, on the go and often to tight deadlines, all of which inevitably have an impact on the quality of the communications.
This new writers’ app has been designed to help anyone who writes at work with language queries and grammar troubles, with tips on everything from apostrophes to split infinitives.
App contents
The app features:
- a style guide covering an A-Z of common grammatical sticking points (along with some ‘interesting’ facts thrown in for good measure)
- a Flesch-Kincaid-based readability checker
- a poll
- a quick quiz.
It also provides ready access to all of The Writer’s archived blogs and enables you to send any specific grammar-related questions direct to the agency.
Worth remembering
Before deferring to The Writer’s style guide, you should first check that your organisation doesn’t already have its own; if you’re writing for a client, remember to use theirs. But if there isn’t one, this app will do the job nicely
Just bear in mind that this style guide was produced initially by the consultancy for use by its own staff and team of freelance writers – NOT as a definitive grammar guide. So some of the content such as The Writer Colours won’t be relevant to anyone external and some of the advice boils down to personal preference rather than rules set in stone.
But as with all writing, the key thing is consistency.
Over to you
I’d be interested to hear what you think of this new writers’ app. Anything it doesn’t cover that you think it should? Anything you strongly disagree with?
Alternatively, do you use a different writing/grammar app that you can recommend?
(main image courtesy of Chaloemphan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)
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