WhiteSmoke helps you send error-free emails. Photo: Cult of Mac Deals
No matter how many times you proofread, typos and bad phrasings have a nasty habit of slipping by unnoticed. That can mean a lot of embarrassment over the smallest mistakes, especially in professional emails. So it’s good to know there’s a tool that can catch them before you hit send.
From text messages to research papers, Ginger Page will improve your writing on every device. Photo: Cult of Mac Deals
These days everyone is a writer, whether in emails, texts, status updates, or any of a thousand kinds of digital communications. Technology means clear writing is a more important skill than ever. Luckily, technology can also help make your writing better.
Never send a misspelled, badly written email again thanks to this web-based grammar checker. Photo: Cult of Mac Deals
Writing is rewriting, they say. And a lot of rewriting is just correcting grammar or spelling. And unless you’re a professional copy editor, you’re not getting paid enough to polish every badly written email. So something like WhiteSmoke Web is worth checking out.
Writing assistants, meditation apps, lifetime phone plans and more are all part of this week's best deals. Photo: Cult of Mac Deals
Here at the Cult of Mac Store, we delight in finding great new deals on tools and tech every week. This go around, we’ve got a gravity-operated mobile car mount, and a super useful writing assistant. Additionally, we’ve got an app to guide you in meditating (really), and a phone plan year of unlimited talk and text. Discounts run from a third to as much as 90 percent off, red on for more details:
You aren't helping, Lindsay. Screenshot: Evan Killham/Cult of Mac
I try to maintain grammatical integrity no matter what I’m typing. But a new study suggests that people may not appreciate that while text messaging, and it’s not just because they think I’m showing off how much gooder I can word.
The researchers concluded that texts that end in proper and correct periods come off as insincere.
Apple’s got to keep the ever-mounting demands on its Siri servers down somehow, so here’s a new one. If you ask her something too long, Siri will respond with trite quotes upon the power of brevity, such as this one by William Strunk of Strunk & White fame:
A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
Of course, it’s not up to a voice-recognition program to dictate what is an unnnecessary word or sentence, any more than it is up to a pencil which line in a drawing is “unnecessary”, or an engine schematic which part isn’t needed.
But here’s something ironic! Take that exact quote above by Strunk and modify it into a question. “Siri, should a sentence contain any unnecessary words, or a paragraph any unnecessary sentences, for the same reasons that a drawing should not have any unnecessary lines or a machine any unnecessary parts?” And guess what! Siri will accuse Strunk of being long-winded. Take that Elements of Style!