This is a guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online school for OnlineSchool.net. Enjoy!

The most productive writers know how to use the web and other tools to meet deadlines and achieve writing goals. If you are looking for new sites to inspire and new tools to help you write and edit your next piece, this article can guide you to 15 resources guaranteed to make you more productive on a daily basis.

Writing.com — Created for writers of all levels and interests, this online writing community is a wonderful place for writers to hone their skills, learn new techniques, and become a more productive writer. After signing up for a free membership, site users can create a writing portfolio, participate in writing activities, and utilize Writing.com’s many writing tools.

Writers Write — Writers Write is a comprehensive resource for writers who are looking for information on writing and getting published. The site features a blog, articles, book reviews, author interviews, news, writing jobs, and much more.

NaNoWriMo — NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month) is an inspiring site for writers who want to adopt a seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Every November, community members pledge to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.

WritingFix — This site offers free interactive writing prompts for writers who are having a hard time coming up with something to write on. Simply click on the prompt generator until you find a prompt that sparks your interest.

365 Pictures — Launched in April of 2009, 365 Pictures is a collaborative project that provides a new picture and thought-provoking writing prompt each day. Pictures include photos, illustrations, mixed media imagery, and other artwork.

Seventh Sanctum — Perfect for writers who have a difficult time naming their characters, equipment, or organizations, this site offers multiple name generators for nearly every occasion. Seventh Sanctum can also be used to come up with writing ideas and plot lines.

Grammar Girl — Productive writers can study grammar on the go with this amazing podcast from Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty. Each episode is devoted to a particular grammar issue and includes quick and dirty tips for remembering grammar rules.

Style Guide — Given to everyone who writes for Economist.com, this handy guide makes a great reference for writers who need to quickly find answers to style questions. The guide covers everything from capitalization and punctuation to abbreviations and titles.

AutoCrit Editing Wizard — AutoCrit is a paid service, but writers can use it to edit short, 800-word pieces for free. The Wizard searches for overused words, repeat phrases, and sentence length variation.

Booksie — Booksie is a good site for writers who want to electronically publish novels, poems, short stories, and articles and receive critiques from other people. The site allows writers to build a profile, interact with the community, and retain full rights to all of their work.

yWriter — yWriter is free novel writing software that keeps writing organized by separating it into chapters and scenes. The software also backs up work automatically so that you never have to worry about losing a piece in progress.

RoughDraft — RoughDraft is a free, award-winning word processor for older versions of Windows. Features include live spellchecking, instant backup, genre-specific formatting, an HTML converter, a dictionary and thesaurus facility, and much more.

Wridea — Wridea is a free web application for writers who want to organize their ideas and better manage the writing process. The app can also be used to share outlines and brainstorming sessions with friends.

Web-Chops — Web-Chops is an excellent tool for writers who conduct their research online. The tool makes it easy to quickly collect information from around the web and place it on one web page.

Joe’s Goals — Establishing goals is a good way for writers to get on track and stay productive. Joe’s Goals is a simple way to establish and monitor all of your writing goals.

Image via Wikipedia

This is a guest post from education writer Karen Schweitzer. Karen is the About.com Guide to Business School. She also writes about online school for OnlineSchool.net. Enjoy!

The most productive writers know how to use the web and other tools to meet deadlines and achieve writing goals. If you are looking for new sites to inspire and new tools to help you write and edit your next piece, this article can guide you to 15 resources guaranteed to make you more productive on a daily basis.

Writing.com — Created for writers of all levels and interests, this online writing community is a wonderful place for writers to hone their skills, learn new techniques, and become a more productive writer. After signing up for a free membership, site users can create a writing portfolio, participate in writing activities, and utilize Writing.com’s many writing tools.

Writers Write — Writers Write is a comprehensive resource for writers who are looking for information on writing and getting published. The site features a blog, articles, book reviews, author interviews, news, writing jobs, and much more.

NaNoWriMo — NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month) is an inspiring site for writers who want to adopt a seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Every November, community members pledge to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.

WritingFix — This site offers free interactive writing prompts for writers who are having a hard time coming up with something to write on. Simply click on the prompt generator until you find a prompt that sparks your interest.

365 Pictures — Launched in April of 2009, 365 Pictures is a collaborative project that provides a new picture and thought-provoking writing prompt each day. Pictures include photos, illustrations, mixed media imagery, and other artwork.

Seventh Sanctum — Perfect for writers who have a difficult time naming their characters, equipment, or organizations, this site offers multiple name generators for nearly every occasion. Seventh Sanctum can also be used to come up with writing ideas and plot lines.

Grammar Girl — Productive writers can study grammar on the go with this amazing podcast from Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty. Each episode is devoted to a particular grammar issue and includes quick and dirty tips for remembering grammar rules.

Style Guide — Given to everyone who writes for Economist.com, this handy guide makes a great reference for writers who need to quickly find answers to style questions. The guide covers everything from capitalization and punctuation to abbreviations and titles.

AutoCrit Editing Wizard — AutoCrit is a paid service, but writers can use it to edit short, 800-word pieces for free. The Wizard searches for overused words, repeat phrases, and sentence length variation.

Booksie — Booksie is a good site for writers who want to electronically publish novels, poems, short stories, and articles and receive critiques from other people. The site allows writers to build a profile, interact with the community, and retain full rights to all of their work.

yWriter — yWriter is free novel writing software that keeps writing organized by separating it into chapters and scenes. The software also backs up work automatically so that you never have to worry about losing a piece in progress.

RoughDraft — RoughDraft is a free, award-winning word processor for older versions of Windows. Features include live spellchecking, instant backup, genre-specific formatting, an HTML converter, a dictionary and thesaurus facility, and much more.

Wridea — Wridea is a free web application for writers who want to organize their ideas and better manage the writing process. The app can also be used to share outlines and brainstorming sessions with friends. 

Web-Chops — Web-Chops is an excellent tool for writers who conduct their research online. The tool makes it easy to quickly collect information from around the web and place it on one web page.

Joe’s Goals — Establishing goals is a good way for writers to get on track and stay productive. Joe’s Goals is a simple way to establish and monitor all of your writing goals.

One year with the Netbook (Almost)

As I’m coming up on the one-year mark with the MSI Wind, it’s a good chance to reflect on whether it’s been a good investment. In a general sense, I would answer emphatically yes! It’s such a convenient machine, I end up carrying it most everywhere I go. The portability of it alone has made it worth the investment.

But in terms of writing specifically, I’ve found the ability to use the couple spare minutes I might have between errands or sitting down for a caffeinated beverage the greatest benefit. While I certainly used to go to cafes and the like with my past notebooks, it was always a chore to do so; I had to ensure that the (low-capacity) battery was charged, worry about getting a seat next to an outlet, and carry the machine in a bag I didn’t necessarily want. However, the netbook fits in whatever bag I’m using that day, has great battery life even on standby, and goes from standby to writing in under 30 seconds.

So, in summary, the Wind has been a huge boon not only to my writing (not that you could tell from the frequency of my posts since then), but to my productivity in general.

Software KVM Switch

In the previous post, I describe one of my favorite tools, x2x, used for sharing the keyboard and mouse across two network-connected machines (i.e. a “software KVM”). This solution worked well for me while I was using Linux on the desktop machine.

However, since then, I’ve switched Windows XP on a desktop for some Very Important Reasons (*cough* Warcraft). As x2x isn’t an option on Windows without some measure of elbow grease, I looked again to Synergy.

I had tried Synergy once before, quite unsuccessfully. Although I had tried all manner of ways to install and configure it between the two Linux boxes, I could never get the two to find each other. I put this down (incorrectly, as it turns out) to the application, and washed my hands of it. In the end, it was a typo on the firewall rule that would have allowed Synergy traffic into the machines that was the problem.

Synergy is an excellent tool. While it performs basically the same function as x2x, there are a couple of key advantages it has:

• Most importantly, it’s cross-platform. So you can have a Linux machine, running alongside a Mac, alongside a Windows box, all sharing a single keyboard and mouse.
• In addition, there is a great GUI tool called QuickSynergy that makes short work of configuration.
• Lastly, it has some nice features such as the ability to be lanuched as a server automatically at start-up (on Windows) and a good tolerance for automatic connection/disconnection (I often leave the Synergy client on the Wind running, and when I get back to the desk and plug into the LAN, the Synergy server on the desktop will grab the cursor automatically).

I’ll continue next time with some of the “must-have” apps and tricks for netbooks, in the vein of Dustin’s post here. Only focused on Linux, natch!

Jamie Grove of the excellent writing blog How Not to Write has created something special for iPhone or iPod Touch owners who write: WriteChain. More than just a word-count tracker, WriteChain is built around the principle of the chain, encouraging you to write every day to avoid “breaking the chain”.

WriteChain is a simple app. On the home page, you enter how many words you write each day. If you want, you can add notes by editing the day’s session under the “Sessions” tab. WriteChain will keep track of each day’s session, and let you review the sessions and notes whenever you want.

But that’s not the real reason to own WriteChain. The “special sauce” of WriteChain is the idea of a chain. Here’s how it works: you enter in a daily writing goal, and every day you meet that goal, you add a “link” to the “chain”. Your goal is to keep the chain unbroken – to keep adding links day after day after day – and WriteChain will let you know if you let the chain break.

If you’re not a daily writer, that’s ok – you can select a longer period in the preferences. So, for example, you could select a maximum timeframe of 3 days. As long as you meet your writing goal in that three days, you’ll earn your link; go three days and an hour (or 14 weeks, or a year-and-a-half) without reaching your writing goal, and the chain is broken – you’ll have to start over again with zero links.

WriteChain is not a revolutionary app. What it is is a convenient and fun way to keep track of your writing. If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch user, it’s certainly worth adding to your mobile writing toolkit. For more information, visit the WriteChain page on Jamie’s site, or download WriteChain directly from iTunes.

WriteChain: iTunes (99 cents)

Today I bring you a guest post from Gavin Nachbar. Gavin is a freelance writer who cannot be found anywhere in the world without his iPhone. As a writer, he has written for a couple of magazines including Hyphen Magazine and The Escapist Magazine.

Gavin doesn’t have a site of his own right now, but says you can feel free to email him with any questions about the iPhone!

Back in 2007, Apple.’s iPhone was released to a crowd of cheering fans who couldn’t wait to have their phone and iPod together in one. They were excited to be able to get their email and go online in places where WiFi had previously said “no”. In two short years, though, the iPhone has turned into so much more.

The iPhone has not gone without criticism, though, and many people will swear by their Blackberries. Throughout the election, we heard about Barack Obama’s obsession with his Blackberry, and many of us couldn’t help but think “Maybe I should get one of those?” Both iPhones and Blackberries are great in their own right, and either would be a great choice for a writer.

Then what sets these two phones apart? The iPhone has over 25,000 third party applications ready for download, and that number is only growing. Different applications serve different purposes, and they do all kinds of things. Some of them can identify a song on the radio while others can give you directions back to where you parked your car. Of all of these applications, here are 6 of the best for writers to use.

[Note from Dustin: For more info or to download these apps, please visit the iPhone apps store either on your phone or in iTunes.]

1. Text Editor

One of the major knocks on the iPhone, since day one, has been that it is much harder to type on than other phones, particularly the Blackberry. Anybody with fingers larger than a 12-year old’s will run into problems typing on the small touchscreen keys. The way that the iPhone makes up for the difficultly typing is by having a great spelling corrector. Text Editor is one of the many applications that works to fix the “small keys” problem. With Text Editor, each key is two times as large as the typical iPhone’s keys making it much easier for us as writers to type longer notes, essays, or even books. Cost: $0.99

2. Voice Notes

You know that time you were sitting at work or cooking dinner and you have a “light bulb above the head” moment, but when you’re sitting at your computer later that night you can’t for the life of you remember what that idea was? Enter Voice Notes. All it takes it two taps and you can talk as if you are making a phone call. Just hit the play button when you have a brain cramp later, and you’re good to go. Price: Free

3.Photonote

Just like when you have an idea in your head, most writers know that feeling of seeing the inspiration for an article. Photonote uses the iPhone’s 2 Megapixel camera and combines it with a program similar to Text Editor. This application allows you to snap a picture easily, and then write a caption to remind you of why it is you took that picture in the first place.

4. Dictionary with Spell Check

This app has made the impossible…possible! You can now bring that 5 lb. dictionary on the road with you without being weighed down by a giant book. Easy look up makes it possible for writers to just search a word, or one close, and this app gives you the definition and even more important, the correct spelling! Price: $2.99 (Larger dictionaries can be bought for as much as $29.99)

5. Worklog

This app was made for freelancers. Period. As freelancers, we’re always looking for ways to track how long we’ve worked on a certain project, to know how much to charge, etc. Enter Worklog. With an extremely simple interface, Worklog was made with the freelancer in mind. With that said, it is not perfect. One of te major knocks on the app is that is it not designed to track your work for more than a handful of projects. If you are working on a dozen articles at a given time, the app will have some trouble tracking your work on each individual project. Price: Worklog Lite: Free, Worklog Full: $7.99

6. Pandora Radio

There is only one thing better than music, and that is…free music! We listen to music as we write, we listen to it in the car, and everywhere else we can! With the iPhone making it possible to listen to music in more and more places, Pandora Radio is an application that streams free Internet radio stations directly into your phone. One can choose their songs, sorting by genre, or by searching for a favorite artist or song. With that, the application will sort through it’s database and find the song you are looking for, as well as ones similar to it. Price: Free

All in all, for many writers the iPhone is a dream. Personally, after buying mine half a year a go, I can’t imagine what life was like before it. With that said, the number of WiFi hot spots around the county are increasing every day, and as a writer you often don’t even need the internet, just a computer. The iPhone does not, and will not, replace your home computer or laptop, but it will while you’re on the road.

The writers at the group blog Magical Words have developed an interesting little piece of software called Character Keeper, an AIR-based program intended to keep track of character profiles and other snippets of information related to your book. Becuase it’s AIR, Adobe’s stand-alone Flash platform, it will run on any computer that can run current versions of Flash (though you’ll need to install the AIR runtime if it’s not alreadyon your system).

The program is quite simple — each note has a descriptive headline, a category (intended to keep separate your notes for different projects), and a large text space for free-form text writing. On the right-hand side, notes (they call them “clips”) are organized by category, allowing you to skim through all the notes related to a particular project. The program features one-click copying of theentire note so you can easily copy-and-paste your notes into whatever document you’re working on.

Character Keeper is a simple little application that doesn’t do much, but it may well fit into your writing workflow. It’s free at the moment; the site seems to implythat they’ll be charging for it in thefuture, but unless they add significant new features Ican’t imagine it being worth paying for. As a free app, though, it’s certainly worth a try.

Character Keeper (free)

Saving documents as PDFs has become trivially easy. A huge number of PDF creator apps have emerged, most of them free, and almost all of them quite simple to use. Programs like Word 2007 and OpenOffice.org have “save as PDF” built in (you need an add-on from Microsoft to do this in Word 2007, but it’s part of the normal interface once you install the add-on). Adobe’s Acrobat.com lets you save to PDF from their word processor, Buzzword, and includes a PDF converter that will transform any document you upload to PDF.

What if you want to go the other way, though? That is, what if you want to get the text back out of a PDF so you can edit it in your normal word processor? This is quite a bit harder than creating a PDF — strange things happen to the original text when you create a PDF that make it quite difficult to pull the text and, especially, the formatting out.

Enter PDFtoWord, a free web-based service that has just begun offering its services publicly. PDFtoWord is simple — you select a PDF file on your harddrive, select whether you want the output to be a Word (.doc) file or a Rich Text Format (.rtf) file, enter your email address, and click “convert”. Within an hour or so (like I said, this kind of conversion is difficult!), PDFtoWord emails you the output of the process — a very nicely formatted and ready-to-edit word processor file.

I tried it with a copy of my e-book for students, Don’t Be Stupid, a complexly formatted document of about 80 pages, laid out into a dozen chapters and a few appendices. PDFtoWord preserved the pagination, the chapter breaks, the text formatting (though not the styles used), and every line of white space — the document I got back looked remarkably similar to the document I’d sent, far exceeding my expectations. The missing elements are things I couldn’t imagine there being a way to preserve, like the styles — I don’t know how the program could guess that all large bold text aligned right should be “Heading 3″.

So what I’m saying is that as a free service, PDFtoWord performs admirably — even better than some paid programs I’ve tried. PDFtoWord is offered by NitroPDF, which makes several other free, Web-based PDF utilities for creating and even editing PDFs, in addition to their desktop-based paid program NItroPDF Professional, which aims to be a sort of “Acrobat Lite” for creating, manipulating, editing, and combining PDF files.

PDFtoWord (free)

We writers have many tools.

We have our words, the nouns and verbs and adjectives and even the woefully despised adverbs, poor dears. We have our talent, our rare gift for putting the right words in the right order to make our readers weep, laugh, thrill, buy — or just turn the page. We have our minds, straining through the days and nights to create and hold onto the ideas that fill our words with meaning.

And we have our word processors. The tools we use to actually capture those ideas and put them down in words, the software and laptops and notebooks and ballpoints. These tools aren’t quite so glamorous. They seem so everyday, so mundane, so… boring.

And yet, there are few writers that aren’t infinitely fussy when it comes to their physical tools, who don’t demand just the right pencil on just the right paper, or who don’t secretly thrill at the prospect of a new notebook computer to carry down to that oh-so-perfect café. (We’re a little fussy about places, too.)

And why not? The tools we use to get our thoughts out of our head and onto paper (or increasingly, the screen) are the medium of our calling. You wouldn’t look askance at a painter who demanded the right brand of oil paint and a canvas prepared just so, right? A word processor or legal pad is a writer’s canvas; a keyboard or fountain pen her brush.

The truth is, there is inspiration in our tools. Just as the heft of a good chisel can make a woodworker itch to carve, a well-made writing instrument — whether a fine pen or a beautifully-designed word processor — can make us long to write, drawing from us the creative spark.

There are writers who write just to feel the flow of ink on the page (I’m one of them). There are others who are inspired by the shape of a font, the feel of a keyboard, the image of their words spilling across the screen (I’m one of those, too). I’m not kidding when I say that I was so impressed by Adobe’s gorgeous online word processor Buzzword that I wrote a book. Just so I could play with it.

Of course, there are writers who claim to be perfectly comfortable with a chewed-up #2 pencil and a student’s composition book. (Granted, it has to be a Blackwing 602 pencil and the composition books are imported from a stationer in France.…) But writers as a whole are especially prone to fetishizing our instruments, and with good reason: the way we write, the look and feel and smell and atmosphere of the experience of writing itself, affects the outcome of our writing.

Gertrude Stein wrote on scraps of paper on the dashboard of her Ford (which she called “Godiva”). Neil Gaiman writes with a fountain pen, in a Moleskine notebook. Lillian Jackson Braun, the author of the “The Cat Who…” mysteries, writes only on a typewriter. Speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison is also a typewriter fanatic, whose devotion to his Olivia is well-known. Jonathan Lethem has given up his typewriter but remains committed to “the eternal Selectric of the mind” (as he told Slate in 2007) — he only writes in 12-point Courier, double-spaced of course.

And on and on. Some writers pick a specific tool for a specific book, like a musician who chooses just the right guitar for each song. Neal Stephenson wrote his epic Baroque Trilogy, which is several thousand pages in published form, in longhand with a fountain pen on cotton paper. Stephen King wrote Dreamcatcher with a fountain pen, too, saying it forced him to slow down and get into the story.

It might be irrational to find inspiration in our tools, to bind ourselves to the way a specific pen or pencil looks or feels. After all, the words, the tone, the rhythm, the meaning — these all come up from within, right? And yet we writers are irrational creatures by our very natures. Why else choose to spend long hours locked away alone as our preferred method of communicating with people?

Rational or not, investing our tools with the power to draw forth meaning from the depths of our beings is a very human, and very writerly, thing to do. It pleases us to use good tools, especially when we use them well. It’s all well and good to meditate on how we spin the raw stuff of everyday life into complexly woven tales rich with insight into the human condition, but we shouldn’t forget the less exciting but no less essential tools we use to relate those tales to the rest of the world.

They are, after all, tools of inspiration.

Taken as a whole, Twitter can seem like one gigantic mass of everyday tedium (“Eating cheese again, yum!”), TMI (“I’m having sex. Right. Now!), and occasionally useful snippets of information (“THere was just a giant earthquake in China!”). But just as bloggers have taken to tagging their posts to make work on a particular topic easily found (look at the bottom of each post on this site, for example — you have to be on the post page to see them, not on the front page of thesite), Twitterers have developed a system of tagging for tweets to help make it easier to find tweets on a specific subject.

Because space is limited and there’s no built-in space to add tags, Tweeters mark their tags with hashtags (#) to differentiate them from the body of the tweet, like this: #twitter. Searching for #twitter (with the hashtag) at search.twitter.com will bring up all the tweets from across the Twitter system that people have marked as being about Twitter.

This makes Twitter a unique and quite useful research tool. You can find out what people are saying about a subject, and who you should be listening to if you’re interested in a particular topic. Most tech events agree on a Twitter tag so that attendees can pool their impressions of various panels, discussions, and the event in general. You can also see what’s hot by looking at the “trending” topics on the Twitter Search homepage, or for a more thorough look at today’s how topics on Twitter check out TweetStats.

To improve the findability of your own tweets, and to reach out to the community of writers who might be interested in what you have to say on Twitter, use tags wherever possible, For questions and comments about writing, use #writing; for tweets about editing, use #editing. The more you use hashtags to tag your tweets, the more useful the service as awhole will be — and by agreeing to use standards like #writing and #editing we can all contribute to the great community of writers on the Internet.