It does not matter whether you are professional writer or a student: there are always chances to learn and make you’re writing better, refined and easy-to-read. Writing is vital for every student but it’s rather difficult to learn proper essay writing. Good research and writing practices are at times intuitive, and the necessary points of style, syntax and citation guidelines are often ignored when deadlines are looming.
Luckily, there are some online resources that make it easier for you to improve your existing skills while at the same time developing new ones. We have compiled a list of ten indispensable tools that every essay writer should have access to in order to improve their writing skills and become better researchers and editors.
- Norton Field Guide to Writing. This is a great free online tool for both newbies as well as professional writers. It contains lots of links to various writing samples and tutorials. It also has guides to research and documentation. The writing exercise offered by Norton Field will inspire you, especially when you are not sure of what to write about.
- Mendeley. This site helps you to carry out your research in one place. You can securely store and access all your documents across all your devices, search and classify your references and notes all in one place all – the way to your specific keyword. The site can be used both online and offline for the immediate access to all your notes while on the go. You can easily cite your references and bibliographies within just a few minutes. It’s also simple to share what you are reading with this tool and form groups to discuss assignments and write papers with your group members.
- Modelbank. Model bank is a website that has interactive sessions of successful essay writing and it is rather popular among both middle school and high school students. For instance, you can look for an excerpt of a good book analysis that has notes located at the margins and a writer’s guide that can be printed out. All that will assist you in the implementation of successful practices drawn from an excerpt. Such method of taking advantage of examples is result-oriented and Model Bank is a sure way to achieve a good one.
- EasyBib. This software assists in citations. There are hundreds of such tools online, however, many of them do not provide accurate results. And in essay writing, accuracy is a crucial factor when it comes to citations. For students, using a citation software would likely result in dependency. EasyBib is the best to use, free and detailed.
- Bartleby.com is one of the best places to search for reference texts for various topics. It has classic literatures that do not have any copyrights since they were published long time ago, and are easily accessible from the site. This is an exceptional resource if you’re looking for information on authors, whole texts to quotations.
- Dictionary.com. If you are in need of synonyms, antonyms or definitions, then this is the best online writing tool to use. Dictionary.com is good because the entries are usually complete and extensive. It also offers examples of how to properly use words in sentences. There is also a list of Greek and Latin entomological roots. It’s an exceptional online writing tool that you can easily use to create high quality essays.
- Visuwords. This is quite different from most online essay writing tools – it’s a visual dictionary and thesaurus. This comes with many benefits, especially for those who understands visual images better than text. Visuwords has a distinct color coding system that organizes and indexes each speech part for easy identification.
- ReadWriteThink. A student’s interactive website that is indexed by learner’s grade level and suitability. You can use this website to acquire vital writing skills from others and also get to improve your essay writing research skills. This site makes writing fun by simplifying what students usually find difficult to understand in a normal classroom set up.
- OWL. OWL was developed by the Purdue University. It is an essay writing lab for both students and teachers. It contains easy to follow guidelines for essay, outline and research writing. There are also slideshow tutorials on how to write structured and well-researched papers.
- Research & Documentation Online. The main writing styles for essays are always a concern at it is easy to get confused by the different online explanations. Research and documentation is a great resource that can help in guiding on how to use the right format whether it is in MLA, Harvard, Chicago or APA.
Writing great essays is very important part of learning process. If you find it hard to write properly, you won’t be able to show your knowledge and express your opinion. So, use 10 online tools mentioned above and improve your writing skills.