The Student’s Toolbox: Essential Resources and Apps for Academic Writing
While studying for a professional degree, students face different types of writing assignments. When completing them, academic writing skills become critically needed. Thus, academic writing is an essential part of student life. From summaries and lab reports to essays and research papers, academic writing has become an integral part of the learning process. When completing such tasks, students must adhere to certain standards and requirements. Otherwise, the work will not be accepted as scientific and of the appropriate level. To facilitate the process of creating high-quality texts and make it more productive, students must have the right tools and resources. Below we will look at what resources and apps can help students with their scholarly writing.
Online Writing Services as the Right Choice
Time is the most valuable resource for everyone. And even more so for students. Often, a large number of papers that need to be written can create a problem with effective time management. Moreover, written work in college or university has to meet the strict requirements of the educational institution. It must also be perfect in grammar, lexicon, and stylistic terms. In such circumstances, student should not neglect the help of expert writers from writing services online, which will help learners not only save their time but also focus on critical academic tasks. By using such services, students can be sure that their research papers and essays will be logical, structured, and completed on time. Also, the last ones will bein accordance with all the necessary requirements. This way, learners will have time to devote to deepening their specialized subjects or relaxing with their favorite hobbies.
Bibliographic Managers
It should be remembered that one of the first steps in writing academic texts is to organize references, sources, and thus bibliographies. Bibliographic managers help you create and organize a list of references. This is important because it is the way to determine the seriousness of the work. That is, the professor will see that the student has used various scientific works and sought evidence of their statements from recognized researchers and scientists. The most popular tools for organizing and streamlining are:
- Zotero
- EndNote
- Mendeley
They allow users to:
- store links to articles and books,
- automatically generate a bibliography,
- insert links into the text,
Online Editors
Today’s students have the opportunity to use online editors to write and edit texts. Among the popular tools that allow them to work on texts in real time are the following ones:
- Google Docs
- Microsoft Office Online
- LibreOffice
Their benefits are as follows:
- the convenience of collaboration with classmates and teachers,
- automatic saving of documents in cloud storage.
Plagiarism Checker
Uniqueness of the text and correct citation are mandatory requirements for academic writing. Quite often, when writing a paper, students re-read so much information on the research topic that when drawing their conclusions, they may use phrases they have already read before. At the same time they think the last ones are their own. Thus, checking for plagiarism and originality is a mandatory step after creating a paper. You can use the following services to do this:
- Turnitin
- Copyscape
Grammar and Style Editors
Correct grammar and writing style are must-haves when writing academic texts. Tools that automatically correct mistakes and suggest stylistic improvements can make students’ lives much easier. Popular editors that can help to avoid grammatical and stylistic mistakes are:
- Grammarly
- ProWritingAid
Specialized Search Engines
There are also specialized search engines. Among them, for example,
- Google Scholar
- JSTOR
They help to find scientific articles and publications for research.
Self-education
Students can also use online platforms to improve their skills. For example, Coursera or edX offer courses from the world’s leading universities. They can help learners improve their academic skills and learn more about a particular topic.
Self-organization
To plan and organize academic tasks more efficiently, students can also use task management apps. For example,
- Todoist
- Trello
These tools help to:
- create lists of tasks,
- set deadlines,
- track progress on tasks.
All things considered, academic writing tools are both affordable and diverse at the same time. So, students have a lot of options. And help for achieving high results in their academic endeavors will not be long in coming. After all, such tools help students to be more productive. And also, to ensure the high quality of their academic work. Using such resources, students can overcome difficulties and achieve high results in their educational activities.
Carly Benson
Author and blogger about technical innovations in the field of modern teaching methods. Researcher of their impact on the formation of modern students’ skills. Essay writer on academic performance and student psychology.