It Was A Dark And Stormy Night ....

I use both Ulysses and Scrivener!
The former for smaller projects and the latter for the more complex stuff.
Ulysses is somewhat minimalist, while Scrivener is feature laden, for when you need it.

 

Didn't forget. Just busy! Will do later this evening.

 

A large part of good writing is about good editing. The first draft can be as tear-able as you wish to make it, but after that, it is all down to the revisions. Even the most talented writer needs a good editor, while the best editor remains an unobtrusive polisher, burnishing the text in the background, often saving the writer from himself. Editing by itself cannot compensate for weak writing, and neither can the tools we are about to discuss. They are useful, but only when deployed with an abundance of caution - especially the automated tools. If all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail but used carefully, such tools can help you “chip away everything that it isn’t”. The obsessive writer often chips away even at published works!

 

As Indians educated in English, most of us write by ear. We can sense when something is wrong with the music of the words, we can hear in our mind's ear a rasping cadence, even when we don’t quite know what’s wrong or even less how to fix it. Those immortal first lines and elegiac closing sentences bubble out of that sense of music. This comes with practice. And imitation. Here’s an exhortation to steal from Gary Provost, mentioned earlier in this thread: “… steal small, not big, and don’t steal from just one source. Someone said that if you steal from one writer it’s called plagiarism, but if you steal from several, it’s called research. So steal from everybody, but steal only a sentence or phrase at a time.” And perhaps shape and edit it to suit your purposes.

Middle-school-me discovered this with the force of revelation when I came across the phrase “only time will tell”. For reasons I cannot fathom, these four innocuous words strung together pierced my unschooled consciousness with their air of menace. Anything could happen. You never know. You could almost hear the theremin in the background portending danger. Once struck, I unleashed this newfound weapon with fury. At 10:30 am on Friday in English composition: “Can our friend the squirrel escape the ravages of global warming and climate change? Or is he doomed to extinction like the Tasmanian devil, the dodo, and the dinosaur before him? Only time will tell”. Three hours later in a history essay: “Can Indian democracy survive Ambedkar’s push for universal adult franchise? Or will the illiteracy of the majority lead to mob rule? Only time will tell.”

So, will this thread and a listing of editing/proofing tools help you with your writing?
You got it. Only time will tell.

 

Now for the tools themselves. Starting with the obvious:

(1) A Dictionary: Online dictionaries make this one easy. You can find one for any level. Dictionary.com is ubiquitous. I prefer the OED, but a personal subscription to the beast in all its glory is expensive (~$300/year), if you don't have access to an institutional subscription. Nothing beats the OED, especially for etymology and history of use, but if you want something simpler, one of the learner's dictionaries may work for you. We don't have to belabor the value of a good dictionary.

(2) A thesaurus: This is indispensable, but I am always surprised at how few people actually use one. Every time you feel tempted to use the word "utilize", smack yourself on the head and reach for the thesaurus. I cannot live without one.

One of my verbal tics is a tendency to use the same word multiple times in a passage, often within the same paragraph. It is as if, having retrieved a word from deep storage, my brain retains a residue, finding itself tempted to reach for that word again in short order. This, of course, makes for clunky prose. You can spot this sort of clumsiness in many of my (mostly unedited! ) posts on IL. A thesaurus is essential to avoid this. Some online options are:

Roget's is now thesaurus.com.
Power Thesaurus is crowd-sourced.
Wordnik will generate definitions, etymologies, and many synonyms.
If you like a visual display, especially of the distance between the search term and available synonyms, then the Visual Thesaurus may appeal to you. This is a subscription service. The fee is nominal, but you have to decide for yourself whether the display adds any of value for you.

It's been argued that there are no true synonyms in English, that every word carries a unique shade. Increasing your sensitivity to these shades of meaning is essential for good writing. To do this, a good thesaurus is an (there, I was going to say 'indispensable' again, but I used that earlier, so ...) essential tool.