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)

Enso Words lives in your system tray (the little icons next to the clock in the lower right corner of your screen) and most of the time stays out of your way. To bring it up, you hold down the Caps Lock key while typing a command, like “word count”. That’s the theory, anyway; in reality, Endo Words usually knows what you’re asking by the first or second letter; on my system, just typing “W” with the Caps Lock key pressed is enough. When you release the Caps Lock key, the command is activated, and a window pops up with the results.

Enso Words works on whatever text you’ve selected, so you can spell check part of a document, or get a word count just for the paragraph you’re working on. You can get dictionary definitions from Answers.com (Caps-d), thesaurus entries from the same site (Caps-th), a word count (Caps-w), or spell check (Caps-s). If you don’t like using the Caps Lock key for this, you can change this to the Alt, Ctrl, or Windows key in the preferences (I use the Windows Key).

Enso offers a more complex program (also free) called Enso Launcher that can launch programs and open files using the same Caps Lock-keystroke combinations; the two programs play verynicely together. I tend to prefer opening my applications the old fashioned way, with mouse clicks, but you might like using Enso Launcher. For writers who do a lot of writing on different websites or in different interfaces besides their word processor, Enso Words is a really nice tool to have available.

Enso Words (Free)

Words Count is an online readability analyzer, offering you more information about your prose than you could possibly imagine. Cut and paste in any sample of text (up to 20 pages) and Words Count will give you back the percentage of your writing that is verbs, prepositions, and other parts of speech, the relative occurrence of personal and impersonal pronouns, a breakdown of word usage by frequency, an assortment of different readability indexes such as the Fleisch Readability Index, and lots more information. If you’re using Word 2003 or 2007 or Google Docs, you’re already getting some of this information, but Words Count takes it to the limit, offering about every known way of looking at whether your text works, and for whom. My only complaint is that it doesn’t offer much in the way of explanation for many of the readability indexes; I guess that’s why we have Wikipedia…

Worth a check-out.