Best Free Writing Tools for Students

Best Free Writing Tools for Students Do you experience writer’s block sometimes? Do you get distracted all too often and all too easily? Do you feel that your research practices could be more efficient? There is a single solution to these and other problems you might have writing tools for college students. Gone are the times when you were all on your own in your writing endeavors. Today, not using any tools in your writing roughly equates to scribbling with a quill on a parchment… This might sound as an exaggeration, but using writing tools can really help A LOT. Now, there are tens, probably hundreds of writing tools designed for all kinds of writers â€" playwrights, copywriters, journalists, and scientists. How do you know which ones to use? To spare you the need to pick and test out all those writing tools available, we picked the best ones and described their functionality. Enjoy! Draft Microsoft Word is a good and natural choice of word processor, but admittedly, it is quite distracting with all those tool bars at the top. How about a clean, distraction-free interface? Draft will provide such distraction-free writing environment with the functionality of backing up your work and sharing it with other collaborators. What it is even better (or quite annoying â€" depends on how you look at it), Draft will track how many words you write a day and will remind you if you missed your daily word limit. Handy, isn’t it? Readability Score Did you ever have to climb through words, trying to get to the point that the author tried to convey? If you did, then you know how important readability is. There is no way around it: if your text is not readable, it won’t get enough appreciation even if it contains some brilliant words. Use Readability Score to check whether your writing is comprehensible at the level of your readers. If not, rewrite without a single doubt. Todoist Forget about the actual students writing tools for a while. How do you plan your research? Do you mark it down in your notebook? Do you make a schedule and then follow it religiously? Do you dig whenever you have a free hour or two? With Todoist, you can plan all your research (and writing) activities in advance to make sure you are on schedule. Block Site Unlike other free writing tools online included in this list, Block Site is a Chrome application that will help you stay focused. Use it to filter out undesired websites and force your mind to concentrate on what you need to do most â€" write. A person who has never used distraction-removing tools might consider them useless, but once your try â€" there will be no way back. Your mind is eager to turn its attention to unnecessary things. Prevent it from happening with Block Site. Hemingway Editor If there is an all-time favorite among copywriters and fiction writers that use English in their work, it’s undoubtedly the Hemingway Editor. And there are no reasons why it shouldn’t be used as writing software for students. Sometimes, you might feel that something is wrong with your text, but can’t quite locate the problematic parts. With Hemingway, it becomes much easier. The app will tell you which parts should be changed and how you are doing in terms of readability. Content Yoda If you want to have good results, you should be two times as careful and diligent. Why not use TWO apps to check your text instead of one, right? That’s why on top of Hemingway, you need Content Yoda. It’s not absolutely free, but they often have promotions and discounts, and the price is not that high to begin with. That’s why strictly speaking, it can be classified as one of the free essay writing tools. It can analyze the text you wrote for readability, point out where you could use a simpler language, and tell if your text is original. Very handy and very easy to use â€" albeit the user interface leaves room for improvement. Headline Analyzer What is it that you are writing? An essay, a script, a short story? If it’s an article, this tool can help you a lot. Paste your headline into the headline analyzer and it will tell you how well it reads. There is an elaborate algorithm to evaluate the strength of your headline, and you don’t really need to know the details. The main point is that you can evaluate how attractive your headline will be for potential readers. Even if it’s just your professor, engaging him might have an unexpectedly positive influence on your grade. Calmly Writer Yet another writing tool that removes all distractions and lets you focus. What is it that makes you abandon your project and focus on something else? A toolbar? A scroll bar? An extra button? Calmly Writer removes them all to provide a pure writing experience. Generally, tools that improve focus are probably the most popular among writing tools for college students, and there are good reasons for such popularity. ProWritingAid Even though ProWritingAid positions itself as a tool for fiction writers, it can as well be listed among writing tools for high school students and even college ones. The software can suggest thousands of style improvements, helping you edit effortlessly and painlessly. If you want your writing to flow, ProWritingAid is a good choice. Grammar Girl Yes, we know, grammar is your strong suit, but it doesn’t mean you can’t make a mistake once in a while. That’s why you need a reliable source to check whether all your semicolons and other tricky aspects of language are correct. Grammar Girl will have your back. Thesaurus.com Seriously, you need Thesaurus. You may advocate clear language without unnecessary synonyms, but sometimes you need help even finding the only word you are going to use. Thesaurus will help you choose the synonym with the right meaning and make sure your message is conveyed. Content Idea Generator Now, this one is a crazy tool, but if you are working on a creative essay, this one can be listed among the online essay writing tools, too. Say, you don’t really know what to write about â€" you don’t even know where to start! Ask Content Idea Generator and it will come up with the craziest options. Read-O-Meter We are deviating from purely the best essay writing tools a little, but Read-O-Meter is just too good to be missed out. It will help you calculate how much time it will take to read your text, which is incredibly useful if you are working on a video script or a play script. There is not much to read-o-meter, but the features that are there are brilliant in their simplicity. Google Trends Speaking of topic popularity, there is hardly a tool better than Google Trends. Just type in the general topic you want to write on, and it will show you how popular it has been over time. If the popularity has been subsiding, you will know that there might be something more relevant to write about. Articoolo Free online article writing tools are not that common, and the best you can hope for is free trial or complimentary credits. This is just the thing with Articoolo â€" after registering, you will get a free credit to write your first article. All you need to do is insert the general topic and the tool will create content for you. You can then work with the draft. In short, it simulates a human writer. There are others, of course, but these will get you started. And remember â€" if you are not moving forward, you are moving backwards. To succeed, you need to constantly revise your methods and improve your productivity. With these tools, you can do just that.