Every writer faces nightmarish scenarios of having misspelt words, awkward-sounding sentences, numerous open tabs that give headaches, or missing reference articles that carry an important statistic.

These make writing a hard nut to crack.

Luckily, there’re chrome extensions that solve all these.

They check grammatical errors, rewrite sentences to increase readability, and enable you to do more in less time

These 15 Google chrome extensions boost your productivity and help you to write easier.

Let’s go!

Gmail sender icons

You don’t want to miss out on revision emails from editors or important emails from clients. But with a swamped inbox, this can happen at any time.

What if you could prioritize the emails you open, by knowing the sender before you open them?

Well, that’s the job of Gmail sender icons.

It fetches the company’s domain name and favicon, then attaches them to the email. So, you can visually identify emails that are important and those that aren’t.

Clearly

Picture this scenario: You’re reading an article on the web, and boom! An ad pops.

Worst still, if it’s those annoying ones that cover the whole screen and distract you from what you’re reading.

“Clearly” Chrome extension solves this.

It translates the web page you’re reading to reader view and shuts off all distractions and ad pop-ups.

Additionally, it translates text to sound and changes the page you’re reading to print display.

Now, you can see clearly, distractions barred forever.

One Tab

When writing an article, it’s common to have several tabs open.

It starts with one, then two, and before you know, it becomes infinite!

This takes valuable space and results in tab clutter, which could cause confusion.

So how can you avoid this?

Well, the best option — until now — is to delete them.

But what if you need them later?

The best solution is to bunch all similar tabs, into a single tab. And that’s what the One tab extension does.

It consolidates all tabs in a particular window, into a single tab. Whenever you wish to work with a single tab on the list, you simply restore it or restore all the tabs at once.

To use it, click on its icon at the top right-hand corner of your screen. Then, all tabs in the current window, you’re working from, are bunched into a single tab.

No more tab clutter. And you conserve valuable storage space.

Save to Google Drive

What do you do when you need to save a page as a document or an image?

The difficult route is to copy the entire page and paste it into a text editor or do a screen capture.

The easy route? Use the ‘Save to Google Drive’ extension.

This extension saves pages as images (.png), HTML (.html), a web archive (.mht), or as a Google document, directly to your Google Drive cloud storage.

The moment you click on the extension, your current page is saved in whatever format you’ve specified to your Google Drive.

To change the document format, right-click on the extension at the top-right-hand corner of your screen. Go to “save page as” and select the format you need.

You could also change the destination folder here.

Since all data is saved directly to your Google cloud storage, you can access them at any time.

Grammarly

Even the most proficient writers are not immune to spelling errors, or typos.

Installing a Grammarly extension on your Google Chrome gives the writing assistant access to everywhere you write online. That way, you’re covered on all bases.

Aside from spotting errors, Grammarly suggests specific ways to clarity and conciseness by giving you synonyms when you double-click on any word.

The premium version has a higher number of grammatical suggestions and enables style change. But the free version will do just fine.

As with any AI tool, not all suggestions may be correct. Hence, read with your own editing eyes, before accepting any suggestion it gives.

Google dictionary

Found a new word but unsure of its meaning? “two that “

Google dictionary was made for you. Just double-click on the word, and its definition appears as a small pop-up bubble.

If you wish to improve your vocabulary, you can save your definitions by clicking on the extension, selecting options, and checking the box beside “word history”.

Also, you can transform your word history into flashcards, using other extensions like rememberry. To do so, you’ll have to give other extensions, access to your word history in the options menu as shown below.

This extension would not work on all tabs that were opened, prior to its installation. Hence, you’ll need to restart your chrome browser after installation.

Quilbot

In this digital age, it’s important to say more with fewer words.

As a result, you must slash huge phrases into smaller ones without distorting the original information. And Quilbot does just that.

Aside from truncating long sentences, Quilbot gives better ways to write a sentence and suggests synonyms for words.

Aside from using it as an extension, you can download the add-on for your Google doc word editor.

Moz bar

To rank on Google, you must do SEO the right way: assess competing pages using metrics such as page and domain authority, keywords they’re ranking for, and many more.

By installing the Moz bar, these metrics will appear on every SERP or page, which you can extract, save, and download as a CSV file.

Although some metrics are reserved for paid users, the free version has all the basic information you’ll need to perform in-depth SEO competitor research.

Word tune

While writing, each sentence must sound right and have clarity and conciseness, and the tone must be perfect.

With advanced artificial intelligence, Word Tune deciphers what you wanted to say, and rephrases it in a better way.

Quilbot and word tune have almost the same functions. But a major difference is that the latter has its own word editor.

You can also use Word tune to change the tone and shorten or extend selected blocks of text. But these features are only available to subscribers to the premium service.

Twitter screenshots

Including relevant quotes from Twitter in an article, provides an extra edge.

Aside from the creative spark it adds to your article, it increases the trust value of your article.

But more often than not, capturing them with screen grabbers leaves some elements of distraction. This deflects the attention of your audience, from the information you’re trying to pass across.

Twitter screenshots by screenshot guru, removes every element of distraction from your screenshot. Your readers get the information straight away.

To take a screenshot of a tweet, simply click on the camera icon which appears on every tweet, after you’ve installed the extension.

You can download the image as a high-resolution image, in .png format.

Evernote web clipper

Every article starts with a journey around the internet for quotes, statistics, dates, and the likes.

But time may not allow you to read every article. Remember every statistic you come across. Or memorize every quote relevant to your project.

So how can you save all the information?

Evernote takes clips of entire web pages, or sections of it, and save them directly to your Evernote account. You can also use the annotating tool to add highlights, text, and other information to your clips.

After installation, its elephant icon appears on your screen. Simply click the elephant icon on the extension bar to use it.

You can organize your clippings and share them with co-workers, through your Evernote account.

Readme — Text to Speech Reader

All writers love to read. That’s true. But if you’re like me, there’re times that reading from the screen may seem arduous. You may even fall asleep, still stuck on the first paragraph.

But if it was converted to sound, reading it becomes painless. And you can kill two birds with a single stone: listen and do other things at the same time.

This extension converts web pages, PDFs, ebooks and Google documents, from text to sound. This makes it easier to read and maximizes productivity.

Also, listening to your article makes it easy to check for logical flow, spot grammatical errors, and so forth.

You can adjust the reading speed, voice, pitch, and enable text highlighting in the options menu.

To use it, simply click on the Readme icon and click on “read aloud” on the options bar that pops up.

Alternatively, you can select a portion of the webpage or document you want to read, right-click, and choose “read aloud”.

Prowriting aid

It’s no surprise that most extensions listed here, are writing AI assistants. Although they do similar jobs, each one has unique features that set them apart from others.

For instance, Prowriting aid doesn’t just point out grammatical errors. It checks for plagiarism; identifies overused words, cliches, and complex terms; and ensures you comply with your preset style guide.

Additionally, a thesaurus is activated when you double-click on a word. And all words suggested, are based on the context of the sentence.

Final thoughts

At the end of the day, it makes sense to make your working space — or PC — as efficient as possible.

And Google Chrome extensions are a great way to improve your efficiency and productivity as you browse or work.

They are your virtual assistants, that never get paid.