While I am not exactly certain how useful all of these applications are, there are a number of sites promoting “Writing Tools” to either analyze your writing or help it along. Here are a few of my personal favorite so-called “Writing Tools” that I’ve come across during my time as a freelance writer.

I Write Like- This site provides a tool to analyze your writing to see which famous writer you write like. On the site’s home page, you will find a box to copy/box some of your own writing from whatever source you choose. After entering your text, it takes you to the next page where your site is analyzed. Since my writing was compared to late and very great David Foster Wallace, I am thinking that the tool is not all that accurate.

The Newspaper Generator- For those of you who enjoy writing Onion-style articles in the hopes of confusing non-native English speakers into thinking the stories are real, the Newspaper Generator may just be the site you’ve been looking for all of your life. The site has spaces for a newspaper headline, date, and story- after submitting your information, it automatically creates an image that looks like a newspaper.

Woordle, on the other hand, gives new meaning to the words, “Cloud Computing”.  Again, once you choose your own text to enter into the program, you will be given the opportunity to make your very own “Word Clouds” from whatever you have written in the space provided. You then have the option to share your Woordle with the Woordle community.

Article Writing Tools- This is one I didn’t try out- not because of my fragile ego as a writer being destroyed, but because it costs more money than I would ever be likely to make using the tool. The basic idea of this software is that you can use it to research your topic and find topic sentences and sub-categories within and then writes the article for you. I don’t know about you, but this sounds like the Google April Fool’s joke from a couple of years ago when they “marketed” blogging software to me.

Bubble is another online writing resource or tool that lets users brainstorm or cluster their ideas together in thought bubbles. I tend to prefer using paper to do this sort of brainstorming, but for those more accustomed to the digital age, it might be a better option.