Hello again.

This question comes from someone for whom English is not his a native language - it may sound silly or weird to native English speakers - so beware :)

Since my native language is Polish, I often have a hard time finding the proper description for said and action tags - that is, I can visualize in my head what character would do, but I can't find the proper English word for it. The same goes with facial expressions - I can visualize the face in my mind, but finding proper description in English is often very hard.

All this makes my writing rather bland, and the revision and re-factorization process slow and painful thus, I would like to ask - are you using any special online (or offline) tools for writing? By that, I don't mean Google docs with dictionary of course - those are the 'essentials' these days what I mean is something more complex that would for example:

- indicated that we overuse certain words in current paragraph (or even in neighbor paragraphs as well) and propose appropriate synonyms to replace them

- gave us hints on how to make certain 'said' or 'action' tags based on the mood of the character and body part - for example: you could indicate that you want action tag related to nervous eye movement, and it would present you with a list of some combinations like: 'she nervously rolled/closed/blinked her eyes'

- allow us to generate some good 'purple prose' by combining certain elements describing nature

and so on.

If the above sounds like a Star Trek level tech - then perhaps you just have some good pages that help you with writing one way or the other? I can say I use:

http://www.thesaurus.com (excellent for synonyms)

http://www.freethesaurus.com (mostly for idioms)

Thanks in advance and best regards

5838791 I'm afraid there's no writing tool I'm aware of that can really be of any significant help for choosing how to do descriptions. Whilst English is my first language, I've had over a decade's worth of experience writing and speaking French, so I'm fully familiar with the difficulties you're encountering.

In order to help me make my sentences more succinct, I have often used the Hemingwayapp (which you can google), and various users have commented that they like to use Grammarly (apparently the version you pay for is better than the free version, which is essentially as good as Word, although I didn't care enough to investigate further) but I don't think either would really work to bridge a language gap, and neither do the things you suggest (unless Grammarly gets much better past the pay wall). Although it may be difficult, I'd recommend finding a human assistant who is able to understand your native language, but is fully fluent in English.

More worth your while might be examining the writing guide available on this site as well as others that cover subjects such as hyperbole, allegory, and other stylistic methods.

Perhaps a different user might be able to suggest something better, however.

5838791 Here you go:
http://auto-reviewer.appspot.com
http://www.reverso.net/spell-checker/english-spelling-grammar
http://www.onlinecorrection.com
http://www.spellcheck.net/
http://www.slickwrite.com
http://www.paperrater.com/free_paper_grader
http://www.writersdiet.com/WT.php
http://hemingwayapp.com
http://www.polishmywriting.com/
http://spellcheckplus.com/
http://www.grammarcheck.me/
http://www.reverso.net/spell-checker/english-spelling-grammar/
https://app.grammarly.com/
http://www.expresso-app.org/
http://www.webpagefx.com/tools/read-able/

Thanks for the info, I checked out all of your suggestions and:

Hemingwayapp - looks interesting, pity there is no trial to fully test it... :(

Grammarly - interesting! This should help me a lot with some grammar correction, thanks.

http://www.slickwrite.com - this looks promising too

http://www.expresso-app.org/ - this also should help

As far as I can tell - other listed editors usually use Grammarly internally...

5838851

I'm afraid there's no writing tool I'm aware of that can really be of any significant help for choosing how to do descriptions.

Honestly, I knew it was a long shot, but I needed to ask anyway . It tempts me to try to create some application myself, but I don't know if it would do any good...

Although it may be difficult, I'd recommend finding a human assistant who is able to understand your native language, but is fully fluent in English.

Unfortunately, this is next to impossible in my situation... however I may try some language forums if necessary.

More worth your while might be examining the writing guide available on this site as well as others that cover subjects such as hyperbole, allegory, and other stylistic methods.

Ezn's writing guide was actually the first thing I did before starting anything :) but I will try to check out some info about the stylistic methods you mentioned.

5839750

Wow, that's a lot of tools - thanks :)

5840272 I once helped a french buddy of mine translate something from french to english. It was such an arduous process, as it was super hard for me to explain why some things didn't really hit the ear well for no other reason than an english speaker wouldn't say it like that. In the end it was readable, but it was a super long and painful excursion. : C

If all else fails, you could just try to find a competent english-speaking writer to help edit and hope the majority of the issues get cleared up there, but I'd recommend finding a guy who can at least read your native language just to help facilitate the process of going from one to the other. There are a bunch of groups about finding editors, so hopefully you could find one that's had some experience with foreign languages.

5840602

I once helped a french buddy of mine translate something from french to english. It was such an arduous process, as it was super hard for me to explain why some things didn't really hit the ear well for no other reason than an english speaker wouldn't say it like that. In the end it was readable, but it was a super long and painful excursion. : C

I know what you mean - that's why currently my writing process looks a lot like this:

1. Planning the 'flow'
2. Writing, using mostly simple said and/or action tags
3. Rewriting - when I try to eliminate repeated words, use more varied action tags, expressions, fix the grammar and so on

Also in order to find useful combinations of said tags, action tags or expression, I Google what I wrote and check number of hits - if something gets less than 10 000 hits, I usually try to find a substitute.

While this seems to work - it is slow (time of writing and rewriting is usually equal, or even rewriting takes longer :( ) - I spent most of the time Googling if the combination of words I used, actually makes sense - right now, I'm trying to speed up the process by using Google Spreadsheet where I keep some expressions and tags I know are correct, but it doesn't help as much as I hoped :(

If all else fails, you could just try to find a competent english-speaking writer to help edit and hope the majority of the issues get cleared up there, but I'd recommend finding a guy who can at least read your native language just to help facilitate the process of going from one to the other. There are a bunch of groups about finding editors, so hopefully you could find one that's had some experience with foreign languages.

Probably will try that sooner or later - however currently, I write directly in English - that is, there is no Polish version of any story :) perhaps I should try writing something in my native language and then translating it first - to find out how that would turn out... (I've chosen to go directly with English version to speed things up... but that speed increase may be illusional).

5841713

perhaps I should try writing something in my native language and then translating it first - to find out how that would turn out...

Don't do that. Much is lost in the translation. You can almost feel the clumberness in a translated text.

5841718

That's another reason why I didn't try it yet... I mean sure, you can always limit yourself to what you know is translatable or have English equivalent... but that cuts out a lot of words...

Also, Polish is much less context-driven than English and that can make translation a bit tricky sometimes (while one word in English can have different meaning depending on context - in Polish, one word usually mean one thing, no matter what - so we need a lot more words in general, funny example here:

:)

Still, I think I will try writing something short that can be scraped without much regret to see how it goes and to satisfy my curiosity :)

It is good that now you can find many different platforms with writing tools. Sometimes I use EduCat for my stories. This is a very convenient service for those who want to make their fics interesting for the reader. (i frequently use their plagiarism check)