List of useful tools and resources to improve your English: for writers and game developers (and not only)

This post contains some useful links to resources that will help you to improve your writing. If you are not familiar with English but still want to translate your game or story - this post is for you. Of course, the best solution is to finally learn English or find a professional writer. Sometimes you simply cannot afford it. 

The tools and sites listed below are free to use.

1.) Tool: Reverso

It's a tool for free online translation in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Portuguese, Hebrew, Japanese, English. Why not Google Translate? Well, Reverso supports translation in context of words, groups of words and idioms and I think that this feature is the most important: Google Translate doesn't provide such amount of examples.

Hola!

2.) Tool: OneLook

OneLook is not only a site where you can find tons of dictionaries: there's also a tool that can help you to find words related to the one you specify, ranked by relevance.

Some synonyms, some assiciations.

3.) Tool: Readability-score

"Measure and improve the readability and marketing content of your writing with our exclusive readability and keyword tools!"

I found this tool to be extremly helpful: it can analyze your text snippet or your entire blog article and give you Flesch-Kincaid reading ease, Gunning-Fog score, keyword density, word counts, syllable counts and many other valuable metrics that can help you to improve your writing:

Those stats! Mmm...

Secret tip: clear your browsers' cookies if the site says that your limit of free analysis is exceeded.

4.) Blog: dailywritingtips

"The rise of the information age – with the proliferation of emails, blogs and social networks – makes the ability to write clear, correct English more important than ever."

This blog contains lots of good articles: Top 10 Punctuation Mistakes, Pronoun Mistakes: Which Is Not for People, Verb Mistakes: Mixed Errors.

5.) Blog: caroclarke

Blog by Caro Clarke where you can always find good writing advice, for example, in the beginner's four faults article.

6.) List of lovely cliches.

7.) Cheat Sheets for Writing Body Language

8.) Bonus: words and vocabularies by theme

    8.1.) english-for-students

    8.2.) myvocabulary

    8.3.) englishclub

That's all for now. Of course, tools like Reverso won't instantly turn your writing into a masterpiece, but they will definetly ease your pain.

See you soon.

DF: Reborn second character revealed + Chad Hines joins our team!

I'm pleased to announce that Chad Hines aka @continuitydrift joins Dark Forest: Reborn crew as a writer. 

So, if you see some crap in our writing (and especially in this blog), it's not him!

Chad helps us to transform DF: Reborn concepts, scenes and dialogs into beautifully written magic of English language. Moreover, as a professional writer and creative guy, Chad not only improves our existing ideas, but also brings tons of new ones. Check out his wonderful novel!

DF: Reborn second character revealed

Her name is Taliet, and she stepped into the Dark Forest: Reborn world from another realm (writing on GIFs below by C. Hines).

Taliet was a part of a secret experiment of high-tech civilization that went terribly wrong. She managed to escape, but at a ruinous cost.

Should you manage to survive her traps and win your way into her presence, her fear may be overcome at last by curiosity, and she will question you eagerly, and inspect with her weird glass fingers everything you carry.