5 Tools Students Use to Write Essays

Writing an essay doesn’t need to be like climbing Everest – a tremendous undertaking filled with tense dread, avoided for as long as possible.

With the right tools on your side, it can almost be fun. Here are our five tools to make writing an essay a bit easier.

1. Word Processors: The Old Reliable

Moving on from the obvious, let’s not overlook the word processor. I don’t mean state-of-the-art writing apps such as Scrivener or Ulysses, which are great for getting words on the page and keeping them coherent in more extended projects. Here we talk about good old-fashioned Microsoft Word (or, for Mac OS, Pages) and the even more basic Google Docs and OpenOffice, which trump most vapid social media crazes regarding longevity. They have been around a long time for a reason: they’re easy to use, available everywhere, and reasonably reliable. Students can use spell check to make documents look neat quickly. If you’re working with Google Docs, you can use the “Comments” feature to make notes or give feedback right where you need it.

Professional writing services are just one of the many tools that help students craft essays, especially if they prove invaluable for polishing and revising submissions to an academic level beyond the writer’s capacity. Using write my essay services from academized can cater to students who want to elevate their work to a higher level of sophistication in terms of readability, logical flow, and coherent argumentation. Learners can create well-polished, edited, and checked papers using support from expert writers and other tools.

2. Citation Generators: Avoiding the Plagiarism Pitfall

We’d all like to avoid the Lego pain of the plagiarism trap. Fortunately, we can indulge in the miracles of citation generators, such as EasyBib, Citation Machine, or Zotero. Your bibliography will be professionally formatted; quotes, books, articles, and tweets will be cited to perfection, whatever style (APA, MLA, Chicago, or the rest) your professor demands. Do you remember the difference between those formats? Most students certainly don’t. However, you should check generated citations, as machines aren’t perfect in this human realm yet.

3. Grammar Checkers: Your Grammar Coach

You can get tripped up by grammar — even an experienced writer will occasionally confuse them, and they’re on a bad day — tools like Grammarly and the Hemingway App come to the rescue.

• Instant Grammar Checks: They spot and correct the most common grammatical errors, instantly improving your essay. 

• Sentence-Level Syntactical Suggestions: They improve sentence shapes for greater clarity and coherence in your argument.

• Style Enhancers: These go beyond basic grammar to polish your style so your prose is correct and engaging. 

• Custom Feedback: They offer individual feedback so you can decide how your voice should sound. 

These tools are a writer’s best friend, and even the best writers use them to ensure they haven’t lost their voice in all the copyediting. However, they should just be tools – blue pencils and red pens used to sharpen up rough writing – and you should never lose your voice when using them. 

4. Plagiarism Checkers: The Trust but Verify Approach

We live in an information age; you can’t get away from the magazine you researched on your laptop and don’t want to read the newest research. Use a tool such as Turnitin or Copyscape to ensure your writing is 100% unique. Don’t wait until after you have written to check – that would be leaving it a bit late. After scanning your document, you can approach your editor knowing you have a clean, machine-washable cavity press. Use these tools on your file before your final draft. If anything suspicious comes up, you’ll have time to remove the damaging lump and sew it back in, like that shirt with the armpit mark.

5. Mind Mapping Tools: Organizing Chaos

One of the significant mental hurdles when writing an essay is simply making a plan to organize your ideas. The handy website MindMeister or Coggle will help you map your ideas visually so that connections and lines of reasoning emerge that wouldn’t otherwise be so obvious. It tidies up a jumble of ideas into less of a mess and more of a colorful, geometric spreadsheet. You can color-code different themes and sections of your essay to make sure your argument makes sense. Different hues follow the journey of your thinking.

Write Like a Pro, Not Like a Robot

So, if you’re like most writers, you’ve probably got an institutionalized aversion to essays. These tools can help make the process less unbearable – and more fluidly your own. The best essays carry the stamp of the writer’s personality. The tools allow a project churn but don’t make the machine. So, let’s start packing those digital equipment chests. Or better yet, unpack them and tinker with them.