Writing apps are a dime a dozen. It isn’t often I come across a noteworthy writing app because most are so similar in design and feature set. One is pretty much as good as the other, and can be interchanged depending on your particular workflow – Evernote, Dropbox, iCloud, what have you.
Phraseology breaks the mold and does so in a way that will benefit student writers as well as professional writers. One clear hole in the iPad writing universe is the ease of right-clicking a word and seeing a list of synonyms, as one can do on desktop software like Word. Apple’s excellent Pages app lets you look up words in-line, but doesn’t offer thesaurus capabilities. The lookup is a straight lookup: you get the definition of the word you selected. Done.
One of the key features of Phraseology is the link to another app, Terminology. Adding a second app to the mix might seem like unnecessary complication, but in real world use, it is remarkably beneficial (with one caveat, which seems like a potential Achilles heel). Terminology is Agile Tortoise’s popular dictionary app that functions like a semantic database of words rather than a dictionary, per se. Search a word, and it appears with a definition, as well as a list of synonyms that are more specific and less specific. Phraseology lets you select a word, look it up in terminology, find a suitable replacement, and “send it back” to Phraseology, all pretty seamlessly, and with a back-and-forth that rivals any app duet I’ve seen on the iPad to date. (Caveat: words looked up in their plural form will return zero results. I’ve contacted the developer about this, who claims that plurals will be dealt with in a future update.)
This simple and powerful addition to a writing tool makes it different than Pages or iA Writer or any of the other writing apps available. What else helps it stack up?
- Clean design. Simple and user friendly. What a writer wants and needs: word count, a few fonts, quick information about your text such as syntactic data, and the ability to export your text to other apps or email it to Evernote or somewhere.
- Rearrange your paragraphs. I’ve never seen this in a writing app. Visually rearrange text and add or delete paragraph breaks.
- Drill down on your syntax. Helpful for getting rid of adverbs or understanding what verbs you use regularly, in order to expand the base. Jumps to the selection with a tap.
- For the nerdy nerds out there, Phraseology has the ability to understand Markdown as well, and can export and email the HTML version of your text.
Overall, even though it doesn’t have embedded iCloud or Dropbox support, which would make it oh so much better, with the close relationship to Terminology, Phraseology makes a valuable addition to a student or professional writing arsenal.
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