College essays always take a lot of time to be properly completed, and that’s why writing tools are here. It’s overwhelming to create exceptional written work when you have to do research papers, literature analyses, and persuasive arguments. But luckily there are many writing tools out there that will empower your inner Hemingway and guide you toward academic success.
In this article, we’ll see the top writing tools that will transform your college tasks experience, and we’ll divide the best tools into five sections: Brainstorming, Research, Writing and Editing, Collaboration, and a Bonus final section with the best all-in-one tools.
Brainstorming and Organization
The key to completing any task effectively is organization, and that’s why mapping tools are important when you’re creating an essay or any type of task. These digital canvases allow you to brainstorm your ideas in a more visual way, so you can connect concepts, and organize your thoughts in a better way, let’s see the best tools to achieve this:
- Bubbl.us: This is a free and user-friendly tool that lets you create maps easily, it is a great option because you can add text boxes, images, and categorize your ideas by colors or tags so everything is more organized, you can also collaborate with classmates on group projects.
- Coggle: This is another great free option because it offers mind maps with an intuitive interface, so you can explore different layouts and then export your finished maps as images or even PDFs.
Research and Citation
College essays need to incorporate many credible sources, and there are many tools that can help you streamline that research and citation progress, you will also ensure your work is properly supported and free of plagiarism. Here are the tools to achieve this:
- Google Scholar: This is an academic search engine by Google, and it is really helpful to find scholarly articles, journals, and books that are relevant to your topic and will be helpful to find the best information to support your essays.
- Evernote: This is a digital app to take notes, but it goes beyond just simply jotting down ideas because this app offers clip webpages, organizes research materials with tags, and creates annotated bibliographies, these resources will make capturing online resources a breeze.
- Mendeley: Mendeley is a free reference management software that helps you organize PDFs, create bibliographies in different citation styles, and even generate in-text citations, so with this tool you can say goodbye to tedious formatting.
Writing and Editing
Now that we have brainstorming and research covered, you can start to create our perfect essay that will secure an A+, but to achieve this we need some writing tools to ensure we polish our writing, so here are the best tools to achieve this.
- Grammarly: This is a very useful writing tool for students, in its free version Grammarly offers checks for grammar, suggestions of synonyms, and identification of overused words, the only disadvantage is that the best features are only available on the paid plans and they can be expensive.
- Script-Timer: This is a complete writing tool that offers many useful tools like a grammar checker, word counter, speaking time calculator, and even an AI script coach that is useful to help you improve your essays or any type of written content. Another advantage is that it has budget-friendly paid plans, but even the free version offers great features.
- Hemingway Editor: This tool is focused on making your writing clear and concise, by highlighting complex unnecessary sentences, passive voice, and adverbs, ensuring you are able to write with directness and power.
Collaboration and Feedback
In college, we always have collaborative tasks and it’s a key part of the journey, so let’s see some tools that will help you share your drafts, receive feedback from mates and professors, and polish your work.
- Google Docs: This is probably the most known writing tool in this blog, but it’s still worth talking about because it allows real-time collaboration, you can share your essays, track edits, and leave comments to improve your essay.
- Overleaf: This is a cloud-based writing tool that is specifically designed for scientific papers and technical documents. With Overleaf you can write equations and technical symbols so it’s ideal for science students.
Bonus Writing Tools
In this section we’ll see the writing tools with a wider variety of functionalities to enhance your writing experience.
- Focus Writer: This is a distraction-free writing app that helps you stay on track by minimizing the interface, blocking out distractions, and highlighting the sentence you’re currently working on.
- Script-Timer: As mentioned before this writing tool offers everything you need to improve your writing, but it also offers voice over creation to bring writings to life, or even classes. So, with Script Timer you have an environment with all the tools needed to create any type of writing.
- One Look: This online tool goes beyond synonyms because it allows you to look up a word and find related words categorized by meaning, part of speech, and even connotation.
These tools are meant to empower you and improve your essays, not to replace your critical thinking and writing skills, so use them strategically, and don’t be afraid to experiment with different tools until the one that perfectly aligns with your needs.
