6 Online Tools that Make Essay Writing a Breeze

Even as many classrooms come into the 21^st century with high-tech computer labs and 1:1 devices, it seems like teachers may never give up assigning essays. Whether it’s the traditional 5-paragraph essay, your college admission essay, or even your dissertation, writing can be tough. Luckily, online resources that offer assistance with the essay-writing process exist. Now it might not be for everyone, and some may feel it isn’t fair, but there are companies now that employ people to write your essay for you, like this custom research paper writing from emergencyessay.

We’ve found a few great tools that bring essay writing into modern times. With these apps and websites, writing your essay should be a breeze.

Essay Writing Resources

1. Essay Writing Guide 3.0: This app supports students in the area of organization, content, style, and mechanics. The sleek looking and easy to use app offers instructional notes on writing concepts, explanations of proper grammatical and stylistic rules, and examples from literature. A college English professor developed the Essay Writing Guide app. You can find the app for $2.99 on iTunes fort the iPhone and iPad or free on android devices at Google Play.

2. Purdue OWL: The website for the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue University offers free instructional resources on many writing topics. Everything from information about the basic writing process to grammar reviews to material on academic proposals and book reviews is available. One particularly helpful section is called: Common Writing Assignments. Within this section, you can choose to find more information on common assignments like argument papers, book reports, essays for exams, and research papers. The website contains material that walks you through the purpose of the assignment and the steps to completing it.

3. Essay Map: ReadWriteThink offers an interactive essay map. You begin by filling out your name and the topic of your essay. You then type a few sentences that introduce the topic, fill in main ideas and supporting details about the topic that you’ll include in your essay, and write a few sentences to conclude the essay. Using this information, the site creates a printable essay map graphic organizer that can be used to write your final essay.

4. Grammarly: This app is a more in-depth spelling and grammar checker than the ones available in common word processing programs. You can log into the site for a free membership and upload your essay. The program identifies spelling and grammatical errors. The app will underline a mistake and explain why it’s an error. You also have the option to click on the mistake to fix it. The spell check is contextual, meaning that even if the word is spelled correctly, if it’s used incorrectly, Grammarly will let you know. The Chrome plug-in allows Grammarly to check your writing across emails, Facebook, and all of your online applications.

5. SAT Writing: This app by Brainscape was developed to help students improve their SAT writing scores. The app reviews material like sentence improvement, irregular words, idioms, and much more. The essay portion of the app offers time management techniques, writing templates, essay planning ideas, and tips on topic sentences, paragraphing, and transitions. It’s 4.99 at iTunes for both iPhone and iPad.

6. Bubbl.us: This mind-mapping tool allows students to create visual outlines that make sense to them. Rather than filling in a static graphic organizer, the Bubbl.us app lets students add and connect text bubbles as needed. The bubbles can be color- coded and contain any amount of text. Bubbles can also contain hyperlinks so students can link to sources in order to write citations for their essays. Files and images can be uploaded to bubbles. Bubbl.us encourages divergent thinking and creativity in the writing process. You can sign up for a free account on the bubbl.us website. The free account lets you create 3 maps.

The essay as an assignment isn’t going away anytime soon. Don’t make writing more difficult than it has to be. Use the resources that are available on your phone and on your computer to help you conquer the essay.

Written by Amanda Ronan