If there’s one major thing yWriter lacks, it is the ability to compile your manuscript into a suitable format for distribution. 3), which could be a potentially useful tool when you come to edit your drafts (assuming you can be honest with yourself about the quality of your work). The tools for developing characters, settings and items which appear in your story are simple enough to use, if a little basic and inflexible, although there’s plenty of room for writing whatever notes you want.

You can also rate the relevance, tension, humour and quality of each scene you write and collate that information into a handy-dandy line-graph (fig. Walk, exercise, make a drink’ and ‘sometimes it’s quicker to rewrite a short scene from scratch than to keep editing it’. In addition, the help menu includes a ‘writing tips’ option, which brings up a simple message window containing a snippet of handy writing advice such as ‘take a 5-10 minute break every hour.

Personally, I am rather fond of the word usage window, which shows you a list of every word used in your story and tells you how often you’ve used it a handy feature if you’re given to tediously repeating certain turns of phrase over and over again. I doubt if you’ll be inclined to use allof them and I don’t have nearly enough space here to mention them all, but suffice to say it seems pretty obvious to me that the developers have tried to appeal to a broad spectrum of novelists by adding a variety of tools. Though this app is simple in many ways, and certainly lacks the flexibility of Scrivener, it does boast a plethora of handy little features which you can use or ignore as you see fit. You can also easily jump from one scene to another using the drop down menus at the bottom of the scene editing window. As such, there is no easy way to format your page layout (rulers, margins, etc). However, in addition to the features you would expect to find on any word processor, you also have the ability to hear your story read out to you by Microsoft David or Microsoft Zira (a feature which can be handy for helping you to edit a manuscript you’ve grown overly familiar with) and there’s a whole host of tabs on this window which allow you to edit all sorts of information pertaining to the scene you’re working on, if you find that sort of thing useful. Unlike many modern word processors, however, you are essentially restricted to writing in a rich text box rather than on a virtual page.

The window which you use to actually write your scene is also pretty self-explanatory for anyone even remotely familiar with ordinary word processors.

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