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10 Most Helpful Writing Tools for Students
You can write your academic papers faster and better. Would you like to know how? Then read our list of paid and free online writing tools for students, choose preferred utilities, and start using them to study easier and, perhaps, get better grades.
Free Writing Tools for Students
Students in general have never been considered a wealthy caste. Respectively, various free, freemium, and shareware apps have always been the focus of their attention. So, let’s first look at digital writing tools for students, using which wouldn’t cost you a dime (at least, for some time).
Purdue Online Writing Lab
A famous resource by Purdue University and the best writing tool for students who want to quickly learn the fundamentals of academic writing. Here, you can find full and most recent style guides where information is perfectly structured and meticulously explained. What’s more important, Purdue OWL provides clear and practical instructional materials and tips on how to craft great papers for various areas. They include detailed data on general writing (e.g., organizing the writing process, writing styles and mechanics, grammar, punctuation, etc.); avoiding plagiarism; graduate writing; subject-specific writing (literature, social sciences, engineering, creative writing, etc.); and even job search writing (how forward-looking of them!).
The resource also pays great attention to research and citation and describes APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, AMA, and ASA formatting procedures and peculiarities in detail. Most importantly, on respective pages, you can find free citation generators for different sources in each style.
All in all, Purdue OWL is a must-bookmark website for all students, regardless of whether they are freshmen or seniors, learn humanities or exact sciences, and do it in class or distantly.
WowEssays Sample Database and Writing Utilities
Suppose you’ve studied all the theoretical aspects of academic writing and nuances of in-text citation in various formatting styles – are you ready to craft a paper? Maybe. But you’ll be much more prepared if you see the final result of a similar assignment. Arguably, the best place where you can do that is WowEssays.com. One of the components of this educational portal is a huge sample database that includes almost 100.000 items. They are all categorized by topics and subjects and can also be searched by keyword(s). Database creators claim that each sample was crafted by an expert essay writer free from plagiarism – initially, of course. Today, you eventually shouldn’t copy and use any part of published essays in your works as it will surely be detected as borrowed content. The best way to handle samples is to analyze them to spot great writing techniques, point out content presentation and structuring know-hows, draw overall inspiration, and use them as writing models to follow.
Another WowEssays’ feature you might find quite useful is a free directory of writing and supplementary utilities. The catalog includes over two dozen helpful tools, with topic, citation, thesis, summary generators; grammar, spelling, readability checkers; plus various converters, counters, calculators, etc.
In a nutshell, you can visit the WowEssays sample database to see how decent papers should be crafted and use the free tools they offer to write with less effort.
Thesaurus.com
If you haven’t heard about Thesaurus.com before – it’s your major miss. The website is mostly known for its synonymizer, but there is a ton of other useful stuff. First off, where there are synonyms, there are also antonyms. Yet, the most interesting part in terms of writing includes writing prompts, writing tips, and an absolutely fabulous grammar coach. In the end, Thesaurus.com is an extremely effective tool that helps writers find multiple ways to say it better.
If you like Thesaurus, you can also try out its alternative “on juice” – OneLook.com. Aside from traditional classification by parts of speech, OneLook also adds idiomatic and old categories, as well as very practical concepts – something like the range of a word’s use.
Freedom.to
Freedom.to is arguably the most prominent representative among free productivity apps meant to make users keep their heads down and work, work, work (in our case – write, write, write). Its main task is to break the habit of browsing time-wasting websites and apps by blocking them. On the one hand, implementing restrictions might seem a bit ironic for an app called Freedom. However, this concept is absolutely justifiable philosophically if you consider a famous notion by a Dutch thinker Benedictus de Spinoza, who stated that freedom just is a certain kind of necessity.
Anyway, back to our matter. The app doesn’t leave you a chance to get distracted on all of your devices – that is, if you have the courage to sync them, of course. The operating system doesn’t matter – Freedom works on Windows, Android, Mac, iOS, and also in Chrome. Finally, you can even schedule restriction sessions (singular or recurring), which is an absolutely crucial feature for people working or studying 9 to 5.
So, if you want to, need to, or have to use your computer or another device for the things they were initially invented for – solving important problems, not scrolling through social media, watching videos, playing games, or shopping – the Freedom app is your top choice.
Grammarly
Of course, Grammarly is on the list – that’s simply inevitable. The best ever writing assistant to proofread and edit your texts across multiple platforms. You can use Grammarly as desktop apps for Windows and Mac, specific Microsoft Word add-on, extensions for all popular browsers, keyboards for iOS or Android. In the end, the app empowers you to easily correct mistakes and improve content flow – we’re pretty sure you already know what Grammarly does. Even if you’ve never used it, almost for sure, there’s someone you know who had. And you should try it, too. Basically, the only drawback is that to unlock Grammarly’s full potential, you have to subscribe to Premium for $12/month. However, even the free version is an extremely helpful writing tool for students of all specialties and levels.
Evernote
Another must-have and must-use application for people who write more than a few hundred words a day. Like Grammarly, Evernote is a shareware, meaning it has free and paid versions. Fortunately, even the free version has enough features to change your writing experience wholly. Evernote showcases its value most impressively in case you work on large projects. It provides you with everything you need to smoothly and effectively capture, organize, and search notes and sync your work between several devices. Integration with multiple third-party programs is also possible.
If you’re ready to spend $7.99 monthly for the Personal subscription plan, not only can Evernote take the way you take notes to a new level but also change the way you organize all your work – or even life, for that matter!
Paid Online Writing Tools for Students
If your studying process requires performing a lot of writing, you might need to expand the scope of utilities to effectively handle all your tasks and, what’s more to it, do that faster and better. So, here are several paid writing tools for college students who are ready to fork out several dollars for a performance boost.
ProWritingAid.com
At first glance, ProWritingAid might look like a pricier Grammarly editor on juice. It, too, spots grammar, spelling, and general writing errors and suggests corrections to improve content clarity and readability. In addition, it also has a built-in thesaurus tool and writing coach, provides detailed writing reports, supports real-time writing mode, and allows for creating your team’s unique style guide.
Yet, the most heavily advertised feature is positioning ProWritingAid as based on artificial intelligence. According to the app’s creators, it helps you quickly and almost effortlessly rephrase and, most importantly, improve your writing through the scope of suggestions, content construction, videos, and quizzes. You can also regularly score points and, thus, track how your writing skills improve compared to past scores. For all these AI-Based features, you are kindly asked to pay $20 a month, $80 a year, or $399 for life.
Ulysses
A small but powerful app focused on creating an atmosphere where you get pushed towards maximum writing productivity. Ulysses has a neat, minimalist interface that can be further simplified thanks to the typewriter mode. That said, the app supports grammar and style checks; provides suggestions for punctuation, semantics, capitalization, redundancy, and more; lets you set deadlines and daily goals as well as track and compare your writing behavior. Remarkably, the app supports over 20 languages.
Unsurprisingly, Ulysses’ full potential better showcases itself when you work with large texts. With it, you can conveniently organize and reorganize content, make and keep notes, images, or background information, break long passages into brief, easy-to-read chunks. All these awesome features will cost you $5.99 a month or $49.99 a year; students are entitled to special offers to reduce the price. There’s one catch, though: Ulysses is only available for Mac, iPhone, and iPad (full iCloud synchronization comes as a matter of course).
Wordtune.com
Wordtune does exactly what its name implies – it helps you select the right wording for the message you wish to convey. Powerful rephrasing capabilities based on human language patterns not only let you effortlessly change separate words and phrases but also create large pieces of authentic writing. It’s worth noting that sometimes Wordtune might misinterpret the text’s meaning or intention and come out of the initial context. However, it is a drawback of any modern AI-based tool designed with a certain degree of inner freedom; plus, with Wordtune, it happens quite rare compared to the competition. Eventually, the app lets you rephrase and change copy tone, as well as lengthen or shorten it. In other words, it can do things required by students on a daily basis.
Wordtune has a free version, but its functionality is so limited that there’s not even a point in trying it. On the other hand, $9.99 a month is not that much for a comprehensive writing adviser, especially if you’re able to grab a 40% student discount.
WowEssays Writing & Assignment Service
We’ve already mentioned WowEssays.com among free tools, with its remarkable open-access sample database. However, this website can also offer paid writing assistance that goes far beyond what even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithm can offer. The thing is, on the WowEssays website, students can order virtually any kind of academic paper, which will be crafted from scratch exclusively for them, following individual instructions and requirements. Yes, getting your essay done can be that easy if you’re ready to pay for it. Prices start from $10 per page (275 words) and are further estimated based on the required service (custom writing, problem solving, editing), paper type and size, academic level, and deadline (from 3 hours). Moreover, the service has a sister website WowAssignment.com, where you can get your computer science or coding assignment done by a professional programmer.
Apparently, submitting custom-made papers and assignments you’ve purchased online is shady in terms of academic integrity. In that context, WowEssays is the writing tool you should use as a last resort only and utterly when there’s no other way of completing the task by yourself. And even in that case, make sure to refine it and implement some changes to the initial document single-handedly.
Hopefully, with this list of helpful tools, you are now fully equipped to deal with any writing challenge. Go on and kick some… scribble!
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