Academic writing can be interesting, and it can be tedious. It can be engaging, and it can be repellent. Yet, almost always, it is challenging and rather tiresome. To save you time and effort, we’ve selected 11 tools to assist students with writing. These include utilities, apps, websites, and services (free, freemium, shareware, and paid).
However, we don’t stop at just listing the tools. We want you to use them as efficiently as you only can to nail every task a college or university may dump on you. To this end, we’ve matched tool suggestions with the five generally accepted stages of writing: prewriting, planning, drafting, revising, and finally, editing and proofreading. Some also add one more step – presentation or publishing. Yet, as students more often submit their assignments than publish them in scientific journals, that’s something we omit for the sake of focusing on more important stages. Read on to find out more!
Prewriting Assistance Tools
In academic writing, the prewriting stage typically includes brainstorming and mind mapping, which result in a topic selection. Yet, we must admit that there actually are no tools for brainstorming except for, well, your brain. At the same time, you can use handy digital tools to help your gray matter churn out, write down, and connect ideas.
The very first thing you’d obviously do, if not given the exact topic by a teacher, is google a collection of topics on the subject of your interest. And hardly will you find a better place to explore potential theme options than WowEssays.com (1). The website hosts one of the largest open-access sample databases on the Web, with close to 100.000 papers, each expertly crafted by a free essay writer. Sort them out by paper type, issue, or keyword(s). You’ll get a selection of great topic ideas to work with and develop in something excitingly original and absolutely unique. Moreover, the WowEssays blog offers posts with even more topic ideas conveniently arranged in themed entries.
Once you hit your topic idea, a lot of stuff will start circulating in your head inadvertently. Some of it might be really crucial for your upcoming piece. Not letting a thing slip away is the task for virtual mind-mapping tools, with Bubbl.us (2) being one of the handiest ones. With this tool, you can quickly and easily enter, structure, and connect your notes. As a result, Bubbl lets you capture initial thoughts, ideas, and arguments; come up with the paper’s overall concept; and build its general framework. The tool can be used for free, with limited functionality, of course, or purchased for personal use for $6 a month.
Image from Adobe Stock
Planning Help With Writing Assignments
Anyone knows that even the best-laid plans often go astray. Fortunately, it’s almost never true about academic writing. On the contrary, if you think out your plot and figure out precisely what you need to do in advance, the chances of success will increase drastically.
Arguably the best website to help students with writing, in general, and planning their papers in advance, in particular, is Purdue Online Writing Lab (3). Launched and supported by the eponymous university, this resource will help you understand the fundamentals of correctly structuring all major college and university papers. Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to develop an outline for your piece smoothly. Additionally, thanks to the most recent APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, AMA, and ASA style guides, you’ll know how you’d need to cite sources in your work. If you don’t bookmark this website right now, you should be prosecuted for levity.
Once you are ready to implement the content organization insights you’ve uncovered with the help of Purdue OWL, we suggest you create a detailed paper outline with Dynalist (4). A minimalistic, intuitive interface masks the app’s remarkable functionality and numerous customizable options, including synchronization with your Google account. Create an unlimited number of outlines in various themed folders using numbered lists, markdowns, cross-linking, and other helpful features. Uncommonly for freemium, most of them are available in the free version, while the full app’s potential will cost $9.99 a month to unlock.
Drafting Tools & Online Paper Writing Help Services
Okay, now we’ve come to writing itself – or rather drafting, sketching your high school, college, or uni paper. To get it done, you’d need sharp focus and proper word choice. For starters, you can watch the infamous motivational speech by Shia LaBeouf – some find it really helpful (though the vast majority just uncontrollably start laughing out loud for some reason).
The former can be relatively easily achieved by using Freedom (5). This hardcore utility is a must-have if you need silence and focus to write. With Freedom, you can block websites (or the Internet completely) and apps on Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, Chromebook, and Linux. Just select the instances shut out, set the timer, and start putting words together! After all, you might not really have an option not to write as one of the app’s features prevents browser restarts or computer reboots from lifting the block until the timer is off. In that context, the app’s name sounds quite sarcastic, doesn’t it? But that’s fine as long as it helps you finish the job for $8.99 a month, $39.96 a year, or $79.99 forever.
Next, pick the right words to convey what you need to communicate with your paper. There’s nothing better online in that regard than TheFreeDictionary.com (6). The portal shows you the endless beauty of words through a set of general and subject-specific dictionaries and encyclopedias, as well as a thesaurus and idioms. With TheFreeDictionary, finding proper words for your piece – whatever it is – wouldn’t be much of an issue.
Unfortunately, keeping focus and expanding your vocabulary might not necessarily be of much help while writing a paper for college or university. Even they cannot break writer’s block or put off the looming deadline. To overcome these adversaries, you’d need fast academic writing help from real masters of their craft – online custom writing services. We do understand that the idea of paying someone for composing your essays or doing your math homework – and how you use them – requires a more profound discussion; yet, for better or worse, that’s not the subject of this article. But learning where to get your assignments done quickly and accurately is. So, arguably the most highly skilled creative, research, and essay writers can be found on the PaperHelp website (7). Placing an order based on individual writing instructions with the service takes minutes, and then everything is on them – choosing the best-suited writer to fulfill the assignment, controlling the compliance with your requirements, informing you about the order progress, checking content for originality, and finally, delivering it right to your email inbox. What’s not to like?
While writing is still a predominant task for any student, acquiring highly specialized STEM assistance, in general, or competent help with programming assignments, in particular, is getting increasingly demanded service. If you’re looking for something like that, WowAssignment.com (8) is your go-to place. All-round calculations and problem-solving services, along with expert computer science assistance by practicing coders, make the website a jewel in the crown of STEM help companies.
Image from Adobe Stock
Online Writing Help with Revising and Improving Your Paper
Once you are done with writing the first paper iteration, it’s a rule of thumb to just put the draft aside for a day or two – if you have time, that is. Then, look at your writing from a new angle, from a new perspective, with a fresh eye, etc. Call it whatever you want, the core idea is that sometime later, you might want to change some (a lot of) things in your piece to make it look, well, more consonant and whole.
After that, run your piece through Hemingway Editor (9). The app has a free web-based, no-registration-needed interface (and a $19.99-worth desktop version) that checks and rates readability and style. Academic writing doesn’t tolerate hard-to-read sentences and overall content vagueness – the thing that Hemingway is meant to eliminate from your papers. As a result of the app’s English writing help, your piece should become significantly easier to read, simpler to apprehend, and more pleasant (for a teacher, that is) to look at.
But is it original? Or it may have instances of borrowed content? The Scribbr anti-plagiarism checker (10) will provide, perhaps, the most reliable answers to these questions. It is powered by the notorious Turnitin, covering 8 million publications and 99 billion web pages. It can compare your text against unpublished works. However, with all those features, the Scribbr plagiarism checker isn’t cheap. You’ll have to pay $19.95 for checking a document of up to 7,499 words; $29.95 – for up to 49,999 words; and $39.95 – for 50,000+ words. Is it worth the money? Well, it’s up to you to decide. The only thing we can say for sure is that if a teacher finds plagiarism in your paper, it’d cost you way more…
The Only Proofreading Utility You Need to Polish Your Piece
The final touch to your paper has to be – obviously – proofreading. For this task, you will hardly need more than one tool. And undoubtedly, it is Grammarly. Sadly, the free web-based version is limited to grammar, spelling, and punctuation checks, along with basic conciseness suggestions. For only $12 per month, the Premium version of this service unlocks features accessible on multiple platforms. Instantly gain clarity in your writing with text simplification and vocabulary enhancement suggestions presented as complete sentence rewriters and word alternatives; complete within ten seconds! Tone refinements are also available at no additional cost to ensure that you perfect your papers. Plagiarism detection comes as the icing on the cake, proving how essential Grammarly has become for top-notch academic writing.
There you have it – 11 must-use tools while you write your paper. These tools help you create an outstanding piece to wow your teacher and peers and, eventually, ace the task. As controversial as the saying ‘The end justifies the means’ is, in the context of productive academic writing and the ever-rising tuition fees, it is almost always true. You know why? Because fortune favors those who use all the help they can get to get the job done – and the utilities, apps, and services mentioned in this article do just that.