 In this video, we're going to have a look at the different tools you can use to make your writing process easier. We will talk about tools for different parts of the writing process for. We'll talk about tools for outlining, long-form writing, dictation, tools for writing in a distraction-free environment, and then some tools to help you with your language. Now, people often ask, there are many tools that you're presenting here. What is the one thing that I should use? I would say if you don't want to explore these different areas of writing, Microsoft Word will actually be a very powerful tool. It has many good accessibility features, great features for productivity, and it's improving all the time. So I would say you cannot really go with Microsoft Word, but I will also point you to some other tools, as well as some of the great features that you can find in Microsoft Word. Now, let's talk about outlining. When you're outlining, that's a necessary part of the writing process, but you may have to make a choice between making more straightforward traditional outline or using a mind map. So this is an outline of a session on writing skills and tools that I've made, and you can see it's quite linear, and it's made in a tool called Checklist. But here is the same outline in a mind map format, and that you can see makes it much easier to see things side-by-side, to see the bigger picture. But of course, it's also perhaps a bit overwhelming and harder to read in one go. So you may have to balance your needs here as you're deciding. But using outlines is not just a matter of getting the right tools, it's also about getting the right skills and the right approach to your writing. So I want to talk a little bit about the process of outlining, and how you can use the keyboard to make the advantage of the process of being able to convert your thoughts into a structure of an outline. So again, here you can use Microsoft Word as an outliner, just to make a very simple outline that looks a bit like this. Here are two keyboard shortcuts that I highly recommend you learn, and that is because in the process of outlining, you really don't want to put too many barriers between you, between your brain and what's you're seeing on the page in front of you. Being able to use the keyboard rather than having to hunt around for icons on the screen with your mouse is going to make the process much simpler, much more seamless. The two shortcuts for making simple bullet outlines that I want to recommend is tab and shift tab. So this is what it looks like when you use these things in combination. So I'm starting an outline, I simply type asterisk and space, and I will convert it into bullet points, and it's just item one, item two, and then I want to make a sub-item. So I hit Enter, and then I hit Tab, and they will indent the bullet list, and then I'm going to have a list like that. Now I'm going to go back to the top level, and I do shift tab, and shift tab will bring me back up. I've done all of this without having to touch the mouse once, and it is much quicker, and after a while it becomes completely natural for you, and you don't have to think about the keyboard shortcuts, and the outline will come directly from your head into your screen without intervening effort. But this is just for quick outline using bullets. But again, there is other keyboard shortcuts that you may use to actually create an outline of an entire document that you can then rearrange and manage a document from a simple article essay to a long thesis. The keyboard shortcut is Alt-Shift, combined with the left and right arrow keys. So this is what it looks like. So I'm starting with that bullet outline, but I'd like to put it into bigger outline of a document. So what I do, I start typing, I type Alt-Shift left arrow, and what I will do after I finish the section, it will make applied heading style heading one, and it will put that section here in the navigation pane in Microsoft Word. As you can see, as I'm doing this, it's applying styles of heading. So here I hit Alt-Shift, left arrow, and it's going to apply the same level as before, and now this is heading two, and then I can go to heading three by Alt-Shift, right arrow just simply going down that level of the outline. So once I've done that, that gives me a great, not only accessible document, also a great way of navigating my own document, seeing what is the bigger structure of my document. And you can always do that by accessing the navigation pane in Word, which is something you can get through the View menu. And once you have done that, you can do other things as well. So you can move things around using the keyboard shortcut Alt-Shift and the up and down arrow. So you can see here, I am not actually touching the mouse at all, I'm simply in the paragraph, I use the Alt, I select multiple items, and I go Alt-Shift, up and down, and I can quickly move entire paragraphs this way. And that, again, is much less error prone than simply copy and paste. So that is how to make outlines in Microsoft Word, but you may want to go beyond that and maybe use a mind-mapping tool. So the mind-mapping tool that I recommend is Mindomo. And Mindomo is a very simple way of as an online piece of software, where you can also download a tool to your download a piece of software to your computer, and it lets you create outlines in mind-map. But the great thing about it is that actually, it's very easy to convert the outline, the mind-map into an outline, and back and forth. So that it's a great tool for getting started with the outlining and mind-mapping process. Now, much of it the writing you'll be doing is quite long for. So what are some tools that you may use to help you with writing long documents? And here again, Microsoft Word can be very helpful. And the same tool that we just used, the navigation pane and the heading style that put sections in the navigation pane, will allow us to manage the document as well. So you can see as I'm in the navigation pane, I can grab these different sections, I can move them up and down the document. So that makes it much easier to manage them. I like also right-click on them and get a menu. I can promote and demote entire trees. I can select that whole section or subsection and copy it somewhere else. So it gives me a lot of control over what I can do with my document. Unfortunately, this only works in Microsoft Word on Windows, not on the Mac. And once I've done all of that, I can also make the excellent document much easier for my readers by inserting a table of contents that is a link to the sections and always updated based on what changes the document. So I go to the references section and I click on table of contents and then I choose table of contents and it inserts table of contents with all the right pagination and all the links. But the great thing about it, once I have done that and I rearrange documents somehow or add pages, the table of contents can easily be made up to date simply by going to update table and choosing update entire table. I click on that and it automatically rearranges table of contents according to what my document looks like. So this is a really great feature Microsoft Word. But the one more thing that I can do with that once I've done this, I can convert it into a PDF that contains bookmarks based on these headings. So I will go to the file menu and choose export. And from export, then I can create PDF. But before I create the PDF, I choose options first and I make sure that I have ticked create bookmarks using headings. And once I've done that, then I can export that document into a PDF and what that will generate is a PDF that is actually clickable. That I can, so as you can see, now I can click on the table of contents but also when I bring up my list of bookmarks, I see the bookmarks in here. So anybody who's reading my document can easily navigate it. And that makes it easier for me when I'm reviewing it but also easier for all of my readers. And finally, there are some very specialized tools for creating long documents. Many of them have been designed for writers of fiction but they're also quite popular with people who write long nonfiction documents, particularly when a lot of research is involved. So there's a free tool called manuscript but there's also a page tool that is perhaps the best known, it's called Scrivener. And so that's something that you may want to explore. However, be aware that this is a very different approach to writing and creating documents and you will definitely need to invest quite a lot of time in getting kind of comfortable with it and getting the most out of it. If you just open it and start, you think you'll be immediately productive, you will find that a disappointing experience. So perhaps I think at the beginning, start with Microsoft Word but if you feel like you would like to take it to the next level, then use perhaps some like manuscript or Scrivener. Now, there's one more thing you can do to improve the ease with which you're writing which is dictation. Dictation has come a long way. Not too many years ago, you would have had to purchase and train a specialized tool but nowadays, it is actually built into all the main tools that you have. So for example, Microsoft Word has a dictate button now and that will allow you to dictate in multiple languages into directly into your document and that same actually works in PowerPoint. You can dictate your notes in PowerPoint using that. Microsoft isn't the only place that has that option. You can also use Google Docs for that and under tools you choose voice typing. The one advantage of Google Docs is that it supports many, many more languages than Microsoft Word. So if you, for example, would like to use it for practicing a foreign language, you can do that and you can simply dictate into a document. And the other nice thing about Google Docs is that voice typing works really well on a mobile device as well, such as a phone or tablet. So that's certainly a good way of dictating your text on the go. One more thing you can do to take some of the pain out of the writing process is to use a distraction-free editor. And again, this is very much an advanced tool that you may want to use if you're already comfortable with other parts of the writing process. And distraction-free pretty much means that all you see on your screen is text. Very often people like to use dark backgrounds, but that's not required. This is what you see here is a screenshot of typora, which is one of the free tools you can use for that. And essentially, again, you may choose to see an outline, which is what I prefer to do, but many people will just want to see the text like this. And there are many different tools for that, so typora is one quite popular. I really like write monkey, which has some nice features, but that, again, to really take advantage of write monkey, you would have to spend a bit of time getting to know all its great ins and outs. And there is another popular tool is IA Writer, which is available for all the platforms, including a mobile phone. So if you think you might want to write on a phone, this actually could be a good writing interface for you. I have recently started using Notion, which is a note-taking app I've mentioned in a previous video for a lot of my long-form writing, and it has quite nice distraction-free modes as well. It's not quite as powerful for writing as some of these other tools I've mentioned, but this may also, if you're already using it for note-taking, this may not be a bad place to go for writing your drafts. And finally, we're going to have a look at language tools, the tools that can help you write in better language and improve the process of composition. So perhaps the best known is Grammarly, and it's not free, it has a free version, but it's not entirely free, and that certainly can help many people quite like that, whether you will find it useful, that's the question. You always have to be careful about going by all of its recommendations, but it certainly can point to quite a few issues. Another competitor to Grammarly that supports more languages than Grammarly is LanguageTool, and so that's, again, quite useful, and it works in a number of tools. And there's also the Sapling Grammar Checker, Checker that you can add to Chrome as your writing assistant, and that also can be quite helpful. Now, however, Microsoft Word has now introduced a new tool called LanguageTools, that's going to give you many of the same features as Grammarly, not quite as advanced, but may actually cover all of your needs. So have a look at that and see maybe again, Microsoft Word may be sufficient for your needs. One more tool I'd like to mention is the Hemingway app. It's a free online editor, it can also be downloaded for a small fee, but it's not really that great for writing. It can be used as a distraction free writer, but what you actually want to use it for is reviewing your writing, and it's particularly one feature that I recommend is reviewing the length of sentences. So it will highlight in yellow or red any sentences that may be a bit too long, and doesn't necessarily mean that you have to shorten them, but or make the sentence, but the sentence in two. But often what I find when I have a very long sentence that there's something wrong with it that I've sort of jammed too many things together, it's hard to understand, or sometimes I didn't quite understand what I wanted to write. So I find it very useful to review my writing and just seeing where some of the long sentences that I haven't perhaps thought through properly. And of course, shorter sentences make it easier for everybody to read. And there are some other tools that can help with language, for example, language prediction tools. So Lightkey is one, it's not free, but some people quite like it. And it is a way, as you're writing, it's going to, just same as on a mobile phone, it's going to predict whole words or phrases that you may want to complete as you're writing. And that can save you a bit of writing. So if you particularly have issues with typing, you may find a tool like this quite useful. And again, Microsoft Windows now has a feature called predictive typing that you can turn on in settings. You simply type in predictive writing. And then on the typing that you enable, shows text suggestions as I type on the software keyboard. But that will happen anywhere you type in Windows. But you can also get that same feature now. It's been introduced very recently and it's only just now rolling out the different installations on Microsoft Word and Outlook, where it will offer suggestions, similarly to Lightkey, directly in your documents. And you can see the suggestion, hit tap to complete them and go on. So again, we'll save you a bit of typing. So that is all about writing. But one part of writing that I want to mention very briefly is referencing. And referencing is something that the Bodleian Library offers great tools, but there are also separate series of videos that I've made about how I use my favorite reference manager called Zotero. And I described not only how to use the software, but also what is my workflow. So that is you can find it on the Learning Productivity and Study Skills course. And I'm going to recommend that you go there before you go into any further with referencing. One of the great things that Zotero gives you is it allows you to improve the process of extracting annotations, your highlights from PDFs. And again, the videos will show you in great detail how to do it, how to go from an annotated PDF into having your notes in your reference manager and database of all our readings. But that is for the much more detailed videos there. So in the next video, we're going to have a look at organization and collaboration tools and we'll then finally after that go and talk about workflows.