Writing-aide applications, are they any good?

I was reading thorough some blogs and forums lately and noticed a few people talking about some of the programs they use to help with their writing. From what I made out there are two main types of programs, the ones that are intended to help with the technicalities of your writing and the ones that let you store and organise both your writing and your ideas.

Now, the only application I’ve ever used to help with my writing is MS word, and the benefits of that ‘helping’ are dubious at best. Ok, so the built-in thesaurus is sometimes worth its weight in gold, and I do use the spell-checker... but I’ve learned that I should definitely not rely on it. I’m not too sure about it’s concepts of grammar and punctuation ether. And that leads me into the programs purporting to help with your technical writing. Now, suffering from a touch of dyslexia, as I do I was quite interested in context sensitive spell checking software, although I was also a bit dubious. Would it detect ‘theme’ instead of ‘them,’ possibly. But how about ‘bed’ instead of ‘bead’ ... probably no so much. Anyway I decided to have a look and begun some on-line trawling for example/demo applications.

Bloging is writing to...

That may sound like an obvious and redundant statement, but after recently discussing this I was amazed by how many people don’t seem to make the connection.

I suppose it all depends on what type of blogs you primarily read. I mostly ether read about writing from writers, or about gaming – from gamers, and yes there is a general  difference in both presentation and style. That’s not to say the writing blogs are always better written. I’ve read some very professional sounding and eloquent gaming blogs. Remember that most gamers, and perhaps especially most of the ones that have a blog, are at least in their mid twenties, and statistically most gamers are above thirty. Not the spotty teenagers writing in text speak that the media would have you believe they are.

I’m sure we all know that Blog is a concatenation of ‘’Web Log” and unfortunately there are bloggers that do exactly that... log their daily endeavours, or lack there off, onto their blog. But that’s no different from the same type of accounts on Facebook or Twitter. And where this type if thing is getting increasingly prevalent on those types of site, the rambling shambling blog is becoming rarer all the time, as better outlets become available for this type of ‘personal log’ site...