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What are the Best Online Tools for Academic Writing?

What are the Best Online Tools for Academic Writing?

New technologies and writing tools make academic writing incredibly easier at all levels, including secondary and higher education. Earlier digital educational tools were restricted to automated essay scoring tools or still-developing artificial-intelligence-based tutoring systems. With time, many new tools have come up that support different languages, genres, and pedagogical focus (such as spellings, grammar, and choice of words). Online assignment help expert, Melanie Petronskwi, suggests the following tools to make assignment and essay writing easier for us:

AcaWriter

Whether you are writing an essay or a research paper abstract, rhetorical moves are keys to effective assignment writing. For many students, instantiating and using rhetorical moves is a challenge. While professors try to provide feedback to each student, AcaWriter is still a powerful open-source tool to get customized automatic feedback in specific contexts.

Whether you are working on an analytical writing piece (such as research paper writing or persuasive essay writing) or a reflective writing piece, AcaWriter feedback annotates text and highlights sentences that:

  • summarizes your goals,
  • presents your stance on the topic,
  • emphasizes key ideas,
  • presents contrasting ideas or critical insight,
  • presents background information and previous work,
  • mentions the gap in the existing knowledge,
  • showcases a surprising finding or novel ideas, and
  • talks about trends related to ideas.

The tool also suggests how to improve the text to include the points that are missing – with examples.

GoAssignmentHelp

This website offers premium assignment writing, essay writing, and research paper writing assignment services to students at all levels. If you need to write an assignment as per the instructions and specifications of your professor, the assignment helpers on the website prove you the best-fit support services to craft perfect essays and assignments.

This service is most useful for the international student community or students who have missed a few classes for some reason. Here, you can find subject experts from all over the world and request customized academic support services – ranging from clearing your doubts to learning how to research a topic to assignment writing.

Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)

With over 1-billion-word corpus of American English, COCA was created by Professor Mark Davies from Brigham Young University (BYU). This large corpus contains words from different genres, such as:

  • Fiction,
  • Spoken English,
  • Academic Texts,
  • Newspapers,
  • Magazines,
  • TV and Movies subtitles,
  • Web pages and blogs, etc.

Students can use this tool to improve their vocabulary and collocation – and to seek context-sensitive help while writing academic papers.

A similar tool is the Global Web-based English (GloWbE) which has a corpus of 1.9 billion English words from 20 countries. Students across the world can use this tool to search and compare varieties of English to use for assignment writing purposes.

How to Write a Proposal

‘How to write a Proposal’ app is available on Google Play which helps in writing a business proposal, project proposal, research proposal or grant or funding application. If you need a complete guide and formats for different types of proposals a scholar might need to write, this app is a good choice. As a beginner, it quickly tells you how to write a research proposal and offers you some time-tested templates to you. It is easy to use and presents multiple choices for students.

Flexible Language Acquisition (FLAX)

This open-source language analysis tool is useful for learners as it makes research in digital libraries much easier. Through this tool, one can search for grammatical collocations as well as lexical collocations. It looks for a collection of words that includes the keyword or topic a student is searching for. The tool searches for the collocation patterns across a 100-million word corpus of British National Corpus (BNC), 2500 writing texts that comprise the British Academic Written English (BAWE), and 3 million Wikipedia articles.

FLAX features:

  • A Wikipedia Miner Toolkit which has AI-based search designs,
  • A Cherry Basket where you can save collocations that you would like to re-use frequently, and
  • Game-based activities to improve your English proficiency and ability to find collocations that can help you research your topic and use them effectively.

GoDissertationHelp

This website targets UK students who are looking for dissertation writing help online. It offers services of the research paper or dissertation writing experts with PhD degrees. It offers high-quality, customized and plagiarism-free dissertation papers at a reasonable price. Besides writing a complete dissertation paper, you can also opt for a specific support service, such as:

  • writing dissertation proposals,
  • writing Literature Review,
  • dissertation editing service, and
  • referencing support services.

The reason Melanie suggests this website is that it offers on-time delivery of dissertation papers, 24X7 instant help service, and experienced writers.

Google Scholar

The most powerful search engine for scholarly literature, Google Scholar can help students find relevant works, research books, articles, online repositories, abstracts, books, citations, court opinions, and theses about a topic across various disciplines. You can use this tool to locate complete documents across the web, keep up with the latest developments in your field, and to see who is citing your publications.

This tool ranks documents according to its content, where and when it was published, who is its author, and how often it has been cited by other pieces of literature.  Google Scholar Metrics can also help one explore the publications in research areas of your interest in multiple languages. You can also use these metrics to gauge the visibility and influence of the recently-published scholarly articles.

Postgraduates and scholars can also create a public author profile on Google Scholar and use its ‘Citations’ feature to check who is citing your publication and graph them over time.

Grammarly

One of the best online proofreading tools – Grammarly – can help you make sure that your academic paper has no grammar mistakes or misspelled words and is styled properly. The premium version of this tool also allows you to check for plagiarism.

You can use Grammarly to detect:

  • common grammar and punctuation mistakes,
  • sentence structure related errors, and
  • contextual spell-check related errors.

Grammarly app can be used to check mistakes in Microsoft Office and Windows in real-time and added to Chrome as a free browser extension. For academic writing purposes, you should choose the ‘Academic’ domain to get word and sentence structure suggestions suitable for formal writing.

Cite This For Me

A research paper or an academic essay is incomplete with references, citations, or bibliography. Formerly known as RefMe, Cite This For Me is a citation generator tool helps you string all your resources together and arrange them properly – with correct punctuations. You can choose your preferred writing and referencing style, including:

  • Harvard
  • APA,
  • Chicago,
  • MLA, and more.

Citations allow you to credit the originators of different pieces of information you have used in the paper, provide evidence of how you’ve conducted the research paper, and avoid plagiarism. You can use this tool to cite books, journal articles, and reliable websites quickly and accurately. You can also use the Chrome add-on extension of this tool to generate a citation for a webpage while you are browsing it!

Some other reference and resource curation tools students may want to use are Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, ReadCube Papers, RefWorks, and JabRef.

Scrivener

Melanie says that she often uses Scrivener because it allows her to collect all the information and research material in one place. As an online assignment help provider, she says, “This software program allows you to take notes and view research alongside your fragmented ideas without having to switch between web pages, PDF materials, movie clips, and other resources constantly. You can simply split the editor to view all types of research material in one pane and compose your text in the second one.”

You can also use Scrivener to transcribe a conversation or an interview – as you can play audio in one pane and type in the document in the next pane. You can also take ‘snapshots’ of the document you are working on from time-to-time and review them whenever you want.

Besides these tools, students can’t do without Microsoft Word. This program offers rich templates and styles, comprehensive text editing tools, and allows you to save and print documents in multiple formats. TypeSet is also popular software that students use to check the format of their papers and make sure that they haven’t missed any important section of an academic writing piece.

If you easily get distracted while writing, you may want to use tools like FocusWriter that inhibit you from using sites and apps while you are at work. You can also use this tool to track your writing process.

Some students prefer ‘silence’ while writing while others perform better with background music. You need to experiment with a bit to find out what works best for you. Soothing instrumental music often works better for students as lyrics distract them as they are trying to focus on their research paper. Tick-tock of Pomodoro timers may also seem comforting and inspiring to students and make them more productive. If you don’t have a quiet place to study and write, you may want to put on your headphones and turn on ‘white noise’ or ‘brown noise’ masking tools to block external sounds.

Digital technology has made our lives easier and it’s time we learn to use it for our advantage. Do share your comments and let us know how you liked this article.


Lucy Miranda is a freelance writer & editor at Assignment Help  She is devoted to her  family, work and friends. She is a News Enthusiast and a Bookworm. She loves Swimming and dancing too. She is interested in educational, marketing and blogging issues.