“It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.”
Some of you may recognise that quote from the 1986 video game The Legend of Zelda.
At the beginning of the game, your character Link gets his first weapon by entering a cave and speaking to an elderly man, who offers a wooden sword with those words of wisdom.
Aside from reminding us that it’s important to be armed with the right tools at the right time—albeit, in this case, a wooden sword—it’s also a great piece of copy.
Today, that’s what we’re focusing on, tools and copy.
Why the Hemingway Editor isn’t good enough
I’m sure you’ve already heard of writing tools such as the Hemingway Editor. It promises to be a spellchecker, but for style.
And whilst it certainly has its place, I’m not a big supporter of it because it encourages too much conformity of sentences.
Sentences should vary in length.
Author Gary Provost called it music and I agree.
Some sentences are short.
Others, are longer and take up more space.
The variety creates a melody, a musicality to the words themselves, which rises to a crescendo and finally comes together in a complete thought, shared across time and space.
Because words themselves hold immense power.
Power to incite action.
Power to transform.
And words can be made into vibrations, which we perceive as sound, they can be made into waves of light, video, and be given physical form in way of tactile Braille.
We even tried to give words to our sense of smell through Smell-O-Vision, a failed experiment not without its merits.
And using the right words even the right commas at the right time, matters.
Exhibit A:
Let’s eat, Grandma. vs. Let’s eat Grandma.
No further proof your honour.
On to the tools.
These tools assume we already have text which needs rewriting.
Aside from web copy, they are useful for improving sales proposals, academic articles and more.
Self-Defined dictionary
Every word we use carries with it meaning and often a disgraced legacy.
Tatiana Mac’s Self-Defined seeks to provide more inclusive, holistic, and fluid definitions to reflect the diverse perspectives of the modern world.
I often turn to Self-Defined to unlearn words which carry a meaning I don’t intend to mean.
Insensitive writing
Titus Wormer’s Alex.js helps you find gender favouring, polarising, race related, religion inconsiderate, or other unequal phrases in your text and suggest better alternatives.
Simpler is better
Inspired by Randall Munroe’s Up Goer Five, Theo Sanderson created the Up Goer Five tool which adopts the same principles and lets you test if your text is using the thousand most common words in English.
Thousand isn’t one of those words, which is why tool itself refers to this as Ten hundred.
I’ve explained my job to my family using this tool:
I make the places you can visit from a computer. Most of the places you can visit from a computer do not work for everyone even though they should. I make them work for everyone instead of just the people that it is easy for.
It doesn’t offer alternatives which make this a challenging tool to use but if you want to make your text easy to understand, there are few like it.
And if the ten hundred most common words can be used to explain The Space Doctor’s Big Idea, then we should be able to explain ours.
Do you have any favourite tools you use?
Know someone who would benefit from this article? Share it with them.