Hello there, it's Amantha. I'm currently on a Christmas break, so I've handpicked a bunch of my favorite episodes from the last year to share with you. Okay, on with today's best of episode. Do you want to improve your writing? Maybe you want to create a snappier headline or email subject to make sure your message gets noticed. Or maybe you want a better way to find those pesky grammatical errors before you send your email or a report that
you've been drafting. Or perhaps you've just sent a nice font that you like but you don't know how to find out which one it is. Well, stay tuned because this episode will help you do all that. My name is doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show about how to help you do
your best work. Writing is one of the fundamental ways that we persuade people to take up our ideas, meet with us, or buy the thing that we are selling. So today I want to share some cool tools for improving your writing. So here are four things that have really helped meet. First is the Hemingway app. So Hemingway is a website where you can paste in what you've just written. So let's just say you've written an email or maybe a report, and you paste all that text
into Hemingway. What it does is it analyzes a whole bunch of things to help you improve your writing. But the feature that I like most is that it tells you what level of education someone needs to understand your writing. So do they need an undergraduate degree? Do they need a year three level of education? So Whatingway recommends is that you target your writing to a year nine reading level, so as in students that are in year nine in the Australian system, so I guess about a fifteen year old.
So apparently this optimizes your writing. So it's super easy to digest and understand. And why I really like this is I find I have a tendency to write using language that maybe overcomplicates things, and when I paste my writing into Hemingway, it just reminds me to keep it simple, use short sentences, and don't use big words where a small word will do. So that's Hemingway. I highly recommend it. Another tool that I love is Grammarly, which is germmrly.
Link to all this in the show notes. Now, grammarly is a plug in which means you can incorporate it into your email browser such as Chrome. And this means you can use grammarly when you're on web based applications such as Gmail, for example, where a lot of writing is done. So grammarly will point out with beautiful green underlying where you have made grammatical errors, just like word
processing software typically does nowadays. So I find grammarly useful for websites such as Gmail or LinkedIn where I'm doing some of my writing, because it improves what I'm saying and I also get some grammatical lessons along the way. The third tool I want to cover is from a website called coschedule. That's cooschedule dot com, which has what they call a headline analyzer. Now, what this tool lets you do is if you're thinking about a heading for something.
You know, maybe it's a heading for an important email that you want someone to read or to open, or maybe you write reports or articles as part of your job, and you need a compelling headline so that people actually want to read the report or whatever it is that you're writing. There's an art and so clients to writing great headlines. That entice people to read whatever you've written,
so on co schedule. The Headline Analyzer tool helps you write better headlines by analyzing your headline or your title for whatever you're writing, and it gives you tips on how to make it better, how to make it more engaging, and essentially how to make it more clickable if you
think like that. And again, even if you're not a journalist writing clickbait stories, you are writing emails every day most probably, and you're possibly not thinking about how important the subject line of your email is in terms of getting people excited to open it. So check out Headline Analyzer. Now. The final thing I'll say about writing is that I'm
a bit obsessed with fonts or typefaces. So often I'll see a really beautiful font and I'll be like, I wonder what fund that is, but I have no way of knowing, which is where myfonts dot com forward slash what the font comes in, where you can literally import the image of a font and it will tell you what font or typeface it is, which I think is
pretty awesome. If you are, say designing a presentation and maybe you're doing a bit of a refresh on your fonts, or trying to improve the look and feel of something that you're working on. Maybe it's a report, and maybe you're a little bit sick of using Times New Roman or Aeriel or Helvetica. So this is a really awesome tool for discovering new fonts that are catching your eye. So those are four tools to help you do better writing, and a link to all of those in the show notes.
Hello there, that is it for today's show. If you enjoyed today's episode, why not share it with someone else that you think would benefit and maybe get some useful tips to improve the way that they work. How I Work is produced by Inventing and with production support from Dead Set Studios. And thank you to Martin Nimba who does the audio mixport every show and makes everything sound so much better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.