“Spifftastic,”

I spend a lot of time writing on my iPad. It’s a very convenient tool for writing, as it’s both light and the battery lasts longer than any laptop I’ve used. I also bring a paper notebook with me for short notes, but when it comes to longer writing, I go with the iPad (my handwriting is just as terrible as everyone else’s). As a result, I’ve gone around collecting a small number of writing apps for the iPad, including Elements, (the now-defunct) Essay, Evernote (which absorbed Essay, sort of), Pages, and so on. They’re all good enough for just writing, but most apps tend to offer the same features: Dropbox synchronization, some formatting tools, and a minimal user interface. Those apps are all very good at those things, but they’re missing something that I hadn’t thought I wanted until recently: revision tools.

So, this brings me to Phraseology, a relatively new app by Agile Tortoise. Phraseology is like most other editors until you get to its awesome revision tools — tools that I never thought I wanted or needed, and which are now causing me no end of grumbling when I do any writing elsewhere. It set itself apart by being uniquely useful when other editors were content to just edit and synchronize documents. Although Phraseology is great for just writing, its main strength is in revision, when you pull out the Arrange and Inspect tools to tear apart your writing. These instruments make it unique among iOS writing apps, as they allow you to easily rearrange your paragraphs to control flow and analyze your text, identify commonly used words based on their word class (e.g., verb, noun, determiner, and others), and see how your document measures on various scales, such as the Gunning fog score.¹ This allows you to revise your writing far better than similar tools.

It bears mentioning that support for iCloud or Dropbox is not available, though the former wouldn’t be very useful without an accompanying iPhone or Mac OS application. The lack of Dropbox is a ding against the app, but depending on how often you transfer documents between devices, this may not be as important. At the very least, it is not difficult to email your documents to yourself or synchronize using another app, as awkward as it sounds. That said, Agile Tortoise has stated that Dropbox support is coming.

In addition to the other tools, there is one optional tool that you get only by purchasing Terminology, another Agile Tortoise app: built-in thesaurus support. Terminology acts as a dictionary and thesaurus, and includes a variety of sources for most words (excluding neologisms or other uncommon words²). By owning Terminology, you can select a word in Phraseology and look it up, and, if you want, replace it with another word without having to manually copy text back and forth between the two apps. The integration between the two works well, and I personally think it’s a nice touch. So, if you really want a thesaurus that the app supports, it’s worth the extra few dollars (at the time of this writing, it is $2.99 USD). If you always have a dictionary and thesaurus on hand, you may not need it. Again, it’s an optional purchase, so it comes down to your needs.

Phraseology’s offerings are much more beneficial to writers when compared to its peers, which often focus on document presentation, no longer special synchronization or markup formats, or a lack of user interface or features (Phraseology’s user interface keeps well out of your way, resulting in only a slim toolbar on the left side of the screen, so depending on how little UI you want to see, this may or may not be a problem). Phraseology is an app that is suitable for writing more than just first drafts or page layout (which Phraseology cannot do), and is most useful during the most important and difficult stage of writing: revision.

So, I obviously like it. The lack of Dropbox support is disappointing, but given that it is planned, I see little reason to concern myself with it when I have not found any other writing apps that provide tools better than Phraseology. The additional Markdown support is useful, as I write all drafts using it, so that is a benefit for those who do the same. If you require a dark or nighttime display mode for your editors, Phraseology does not currently offer one. Similarly, the font choices are limited, and there are only two ways to organize documents: a main documents list and the “archive.” I bring these up only because they can be deal-breakers for some. Organization doesn’t benefit me as much as it may benefit others, and some people may need white text on a black background to get into their writing.³

Overall, Phraseology is the most useful writing tool I have, even considering those available on Mac OS. Its tools may not be useful for everyone, especially depending on how much you use your iPad for writing, but they are very good at what they do, which is helping you improve your writing. So, I recommend buying it, since I’ve personally gotten a lot of use out of it, but the important thing is that you look at how you write and decide if it can help you.

I initially just wrote this to post on the iTunes app store entry for Phraseology, but it got kind of long. So, iTunes got a slightly shorter version, and what you see here is closer to how I intended the review to read. I do think it’s strange that I wrote roughly 1,200 words just because I like Phraseology, though.