Welcome to the become a writer today channel hope you enjoyed this video review of ia writer if you do hit thumbs up and if you want to get more videos like this or about writing apps or the writing process. Dont forget to subscribe to the channel ia writer launched a great fanfare back in 2011.. It was created by an tokyo based designer it originally launched on mac before launching on ios and later windrows and android. Now ive used ia writer extensively to write freelance articles and also to test some of my longer form pieces of writing. Ive used the ia writer app for my iphone for my ipad and also for mac and for a long time it was my key part of my writing workflow. I particularly like some of the features that ia writer has, which can help. You write articles more quickly and publish them online and im going to walk through some of those features. Now before we get into that. How much did you expect to pay for ia writer well, its actually quite affordable? It costs 29 to buy for mac or ios and 29 for pc and android. You have to buy the app twice if youre going to buy it for mac and also for ios, so thats something to bear in mind, and you can see here they have a comparison table versus word or microsoft office. But, to be honest, the competitors to ia writer are other writing apps, like ulysses and by word, which are also minimalist, writing apps and can replicate some of the features im going to walk through.

Ulysses is more expensive than ia writer because it costs approximately five dollars per month, so its more expensive over the course of the year, whereas by word is a little bit cheaper. It costs approximately 10 to 12. That said, ia writer probably is worth the price. 29 isnt much to pay for everything that ia writer can help. You do with your writing and for the way it can help you focus on the written word. Ive opened up ia writer and youre, actually looking at a blank screen thats. What these minimalist writing apps, accomplish! They strip all of the fancy, features and tools and take them out of your way. So you can just focus on writing, so you can see here when i start typing in ia writer, i dont have any formatting options that i need to worry about, and i also dont need to worry about ribbons or rulers or any of those things that can Get distracting if youre writing in microsoft word or google docs theres actually a little bit more to ia writer. So if you want to manage all of your documents, theyre basically text files which ia writer combines in one place with its document library and which sync with icloud to access them, you just click on the sidebar. So i have dozens of freelance articles that i wrote over the years in my ia, writer library and you can add tags to them or you can search using the search bar down here at the bottom and itll sync them all across your apple devices.

Your iphone and tablet using icloud to use ia writer or any minimalist writing app. You need to learn markdown if youre not familiar. Markdown is basically a type of syntax for formatting, your articles prior to publication and for the web. The special characters are basically hashtags asterixes and some other characters that you can use to add. Hyperlinks dont worry. It only takes a few minutes to learn and when you download ia writer theres a cheat sheet that will walk you to it. You can also go to the official markdown website on darien darienfireball.net and just click on syntax and theyll. Give you all of their special characters were going to walk you through some of these to show you how they look like in practice, because its only we start using markdown that you can get to grips with it so im going to type in this. Is i a writer, so this is body text and then, if i put a hashtag before this is ia writer, itll format it as h2, uh or h1. Then, if i put two hashtags itll be h2 for tree, hashtags itll be h3 and then im going to put this in here as body text. So you can see what this will look like formatted, then i click on the play option here or you can use a keyboard shortcut and you can see here its got the heading for my article, the body text and the subheading.

Now i can also use asterixes for lists so list item. One list item two and i can also use asterixes to put items in bold its a great way of using keyboard shortcuts to format your writing rather than uh the fancy and distracting options in microsoft. Word. So again i can click play and you can see. This is bold. This is italics and then, if you want to add a hyperlink uh, you simply put in the brackets and then put in your web url ive opened up an article. I wrote in ia writer a few months ago about the grammarly readability score, so i can show you what all this looks like for finished article. If youre interested, i have a review of grammarly on the become a writer today channel anyway, in this article ive used. My hashtag to put in h1 to put it in h2 and also to add bold and hyperlinks, and some bullet points. Now, if i click on play, i can see what this article looks like completely formatted and its a great way of getting your article ready for the web and then, when im ready to click, publish all i have to do is go to file and export, and Then i can export the article as a micro, formatted, microsoft doc as a pdf html. If i want, i can also connect ia writer to my website, so i can add a medium account. I can also add a ghost blog and a wordpress website, and this is where ia writer excels.

So if you have lots of articles on the go and youre managing a couple of different websites or even one website, you can write them all in ia writer and then, when youre ready to publish you can format them for the web and then publish them at The click of a button and thats much more user friendly than using um a traditional writing app like microsoft word or even google docs. One of the key selling points of ia writer is its design and its custom fonts that it comes with theyre. Unlike anything that you use on your mac or in other writing apps, you dont have much to customize, which is one of the advantages of these uh minimalist writing apps. But you can go to preferences and you can go to general and you can swap between a dark and light team, so im going to change this to dark, so you can show you what this looks like now. Personally, i prefer the light team, but this could be helpful if you like, riding late at night, so im going to change this back to light and match system appearance. You can also add some templates as well. If this is something that you want to do, but i dont use the templates option much, but what i do like is the typewriter and focus mode. So, firstly, im going to show you how the typewriter mode works so just type in typewriter and again you can use keyboard shortcuts for this um just to show you what, in practice, im actually going to turn off typewriter mode and now im typing on a large 27 inch monitor so, if i keep pressing enter, you can see that the the character or the cursor is moving down the screen.

On the other hand, if i turn on the typewriter, you can see it keeps it in the center of the screen. So this is a good tool to use if youre writing on a large screen or if you find it, the cursor moving is distracting. Ia writer also has something called focus mode, so you can focus on a single sentence or paragraph which is handy for first drafts. So if i click on a single sentence, itll blur everything out except the sentence that im using and then, if i change this to a paragraph, itll blur everything out except the paragraph in question. So again, this is really good. If you want to focus on your first draft and youre worried about getting distracted because youre, trying to edit at the same time as right writer, also has some tools which can be helpful when it comes to self editing. One of them is syntax ia writer, ia writer also has some tools which can be helpful for herself. Iwriter also has some tools which can be helpful for self editing. The first one is its syntax mode, which is similar to what you can you accomplish with hemingway app to show you how this works im going to turn on syntax mode and now its highlighted all of the adjectives nouns adverbs, verbs and conjunctions in my article, but Lets say i wanted to reduce some of the adjectives in my article. I can just turn off these other ones and now its highlighted all of the adjectives, and i can consider if i want to delete these or change these.

Similarly, i can highlight all of the nouns or i can highlight all of the verbs, and this is a good way for self editing your work, but also draw your attention to the bottom of ia writer, where you can see your characters. Uh, your word counts sentences and reading time. So again, this is a good way of helping yourself edit, but it still stays out of the way of your first draft ia. Writer also has a style check which you can use to find cliches redundancies and so on. In your work, its not as powerful as what you can get with grammarly or other grammar checkers, but its still helpful and there when you need it. So if i turn on style check its going to highlight um, fillers, cliches redundancies and other areas or issues that ive highlighted in ia writer dictionary but im going to turn these off and just focus on fillers, so fillers would be words that id want to delete. So you can see here its crossed out uh potential filler words that i should probably delete when self editing my work or redundancies, like probably also uh and so on, so were going to change this now to cliches and see if it finds any. So. The good news is theres only one cliche in this article that i might want to consider rewriting now im going to try redundancies, hasnt found any redundancies, probably because ive already self edit edited this article.

The next area that i want to show you is the search in ia writer. So basically you can. You add hashtags to any of your articles, so im going to put in a hashtag here doing and it doesnt get added to the document when you export it. But basically you can save these hashtags as saved searches and then you can find any of your articles with the tag doing so. This was something that i used for quite a while to keep track of articles that i was currently working on and there easy enough to add to the hashtags uh search bar. So if i come up with a new hashtag itll automatically get added, this is a new hashtag uh and then it should appear here now. In one moment just press enter so now its appeared in the sidebar. So this is a great way of organizing and categorizing. Your writing. You can also create smart folders, which are basically a type of saved searches in ia writer as well now, for me, ia writer excels at organizing short form articles and its particularly good if youre, a freelance writer, it worked great on mac using the typewriter model, but I also liked it on the tablet, because its a great writing setup thats portable, if you happen to have a tablet – and you also have a good keyboard, because you dont have to worry about distractions and so on. I also like it because i can write articles in i write ia writer and just publish them straight to my ghost website, to my medium account and to wordpress and its also affordable at 29.

Ia writer doesnt have many drawbacks or weaknesses. Ive used ia writer for years when i was a freelance writer, i used it to submit articles to editors and make sure theyre all formatted prior to sending them over and ive also used it to publish articles on my wordpress sites and also on ghost and my Medium account, to be honest, i could only really think of two drawbacks for ia writer. I guess if youre a screenwriter youre not going to find the features inside ia writer as useful. Also, if youre writing anything thats, complicated or a long form. Ia writer is a little bit weaker than other minimalist writing apps, like ulysses and also like scrivener. So if youre writing a book for example, chances are, you have lots of different articles or chapters combined in your ia writer document library. So unless you come up with a custom tagging system, its going to be difficult to differentiate one from the next, on the other hand, minimus writing apps, like ulysses, have some additional document management features which ill cover in a different review which can help you manage those Particular projects and then scrivener, which isnt a minimalist writing app, also helps you manage your book because you can visualize what the structure of your book looks like and drag one chapter around and see them all as index cards. That use case may not apply to every type of writer at 29. Ia writer is a good purchase if youre looking for a minimalist writing app its fantastic if youre, a freelance writer and if you have a tablet and a keyboard, its a great portable, writing setup.

Hope you enjoyed the content in this video, a few questions about ia writer. Let me know in the comments section below, if you want to get more videos or reviews like this, please subscribe to the channel.

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