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.
Computer Adventures, The Secret Art a guide to writing computer adventure games.
Dave King Editorial Services Writing Advise links some short articles aiding in self critique.
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 E-books on Writing Fiction Begin Writing Fiction is a free e-book covering plot characterization and point of view. Tropes and Schemes helps you learn how to twist words and senences and Dangers for Fiction Writers covers balancing your characters and plot structure. These E-books can also be read on-line at the website.
Plot Whisper for Writing and Readers Plot tips for writers.
Roy Peter Clark's Twenty Writing Tools: Sentences and paragraphs, language, special effects and structure.
StoryRight An On-line tool to help organize your stories.
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.
Writing Tips an on-line book on outlining different types of writing for beginning writers with interesting links. To get started download thier zipfile to your computer, extract the zipflie and double click on the red square.
How to Detect Lies A study of common traits of a liar including body language, emotional gestures, verbal content and context...
Effective Communicating.com has two good articles on body language: Is He Flirting? and Is She Flirting?.
The Blue Book of Grammar Grammar rules based on the The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) is used many book publishers and writers.
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.
JDictionary multiplatform online dictionary that even defines those strange 3 letter words used by Scrabble players. Linux, Windows XP and Vista 32.
The Learning Centers Electronic Handouts Contains lead sentences, proof reading marks...
Proof Reading Advice from Virginia Tech.
A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices Help from the ancient Greeks on writing with clarity and style.
The Tongue Untied On-line college prep course on grammar, spelling and punctuation according to the Associated Press Style.
Wonderful Writing Skills Handbook Grammar, punctuation, types of essays, the writing process and sentence parts.
Style and grammar checkers are excellent ways to learn what different editors look for while they are evaluating your prose.
Caution: If you decide to utilize a style or grammar checker add-in written for MS Word, recheck your formatting after you convert back to your normal settings. You may have to select all in your edit tab and reselect font type, and reset double spacing.
Style Writer A grammar check program that is well worth the money for the software.
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 track of your characters. My computer froze exiting the download page, so I copied it, pasted it to Word and saved As a template file.
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.
DICTGET free program that helps you look up the correct tense of an English word. Lets you find similar words, displays parts of speech, verb conjugations, and the singular and plural forms of nouns but does not give definitions for a specific word. Includes medical terms. Use with English Language Glossary listed under the Freeware Dictionary section of this page if terms like Present 3rd_Person Singular throw you.
Poets Assistant by Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet suggests through selected poet personalities like Dickerson and Poe-- alliterations, rhymes, word sequences, and poem fragments. Study and learn from the masters.
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.
Reading Rater Reading Level Checker-- just like a editor does when evaluating your copy.
Primative Word Counter Redundancy on a free software site is a good thing because Google thinks the more times you repeat a prase like free novel writing software you must have a website about free writing software even if all your links are demos and shareware instead of free opensource software and freeware, but if you are writing to be read by many, word redundancy should be kept to a minimum. Like other word counters before it, this freeware program can be be used in either application. Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/Windows7
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.
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.
EKS Gestures Windows program lets you check your characters actions by selecting the details from a list, then analyzes them to find out what they might mean.
Storybook Open Source free plotting software. Storybook assists you in structuring your book. Store all information about your characters and locations in one place for your novel. View all chapters and their assigned scenes sorted by chapter and scene numbers, as you would read it in the final book. Storybook helps you to keep an overview, helpful for complex stories with two or more plot-lines. Add characters and or locations, edit or remove them and assign them to scenes. Spell checker included. Windows XP and Vista, SuSE & Red Hat Linux.
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.
English Language Glossary A stand alone glossary to look up terms used in grammar references.
Free Medical Spell Check A medical terminology spelling reference tool that verifies the proper spelling of medical terms in almost every medical specialty and field. Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP.
Inetio Dictionary of Synonyms - Dictionary of English synonyms and related words. Lists more than 20,000 words with their synonyms for Windows 98, XP and Vista.
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.
Rhymesaurus Free Edition Type in any word and press [Enter] to see a list of rhyming words, organized by syllablle-count, as well as English idioms, phrases, and cliches that rhyme with your word. Works on Windows 9x/ME/NT/2K/XP/2K3 and Vista.
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.
Stardictionary English thesaurus and dictionary that graphically maps the word your looking up. Also highlite anyplace on your desktop and get a definition of the word you moused over. Windows 32 bit including Vista, Mac, Linux.
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. Windows 9x, XP, but not Vista.
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, MS Word XP, and Rough Draft. Windows 98, 2000, Me, XP, Vista 32.
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 illuminate 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 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. Windows 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, Vista 32.
For info on freeware spell checkers when your software package neglects to include one is found on Smatterings General Directories.
