Chris Maiorana has another post on streamlining your writing. I like his posts because he’s an actual writer and we can be sure that the things he recommends actually work, at least for him. His latest post is a list of specific functions and packages to make your writing easier.
I especially liked his first suggestion. I often end a sentence with a period and then realize that it’s a question and should end in a question mark. It’s easy enough to fix this of course but Maiorana offers a better way. If the point is on a punctuation mark and you type a different punctuation mark, the new mark will replace the old one.
You’d have to use this function a lot of times to amortize the time spent installing it but that’s not the point. The point is that it help to reduce your writing friction and keep you in the flow.
His next function is also something you might want if you’re writing in Org mode. It’s important for writers to have a (reasonably) accurate word count. Maiorana has a word count function specialized for Org that ignores lines beginning with # or *. I have a function like this that I wrote for Troff files when I was writing in Troff but never wrote one for Org. If for some reason I really need an accurate count I just do the same thing with a grep-wc pipeline. Still, if you write a lot in Org, this is a useful function to have.
Maiorana recommends a bunch of other functions/packages in his post so if you’re regularly writing in Org mode (or even just Emacs) you should definitely take a look at his post. There’s a lot a good suggestions in it.