Featured Image Caption: Top 5 Free Writing Tools
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A college student’s life is always full of writing assignments – that is the reality. Many students find that mastering writing is a hard task and end up procrastinating until the deadline is days away. If you are one of these students, there are few tools online that you can use to boost your productivity. And the best part of all is that they are all free.
So the next time you try to do your assignment, consider giving these tools a try.
1. Google Docs
Google Docs is an online word processor that you can use in almost every modern browser. There is absolutely no need to install anything extra on your computer other than a browser, which means it helps you save a ton of memory. Google Docs provides students with the ability to edit and style their text easily, from adding hundreds of fonts to inserting images and links.
One feature that is beneficial to students that many other word processors don’t provide is the automatic save feature. As soon as you finish typing, Google Docs will save your document automatically. Many students forget to save their work and end up losing it for their computer suddenly turn off or they end up closing the tab without saving. What’s more, the files are available online and can be accessed anywhere, even on mobile phones, making it very convenient.
The other good thing about Google Docs is that you can also use it to edit MS Word documents without installing MS Word – all you have to do is to install the necessary Google Chrome extension for it. After that, just drag and drop the MS Word document into the browser and you can view and edit it with ease. You can also export the file you are working on in various formats such as docx, PDF, plain text, odt, and rtf.
2. Grammarly
Grammarly is one of the best online grammar checkers out there. As a student, it can help you identify and correct your grammar and spelling mistakes. To use Grammarly, you just have to sign up and start writing your text in their text editor; it will highlight the mistakes. What’s more, you can download the desktop app and use that for writing or you can download the plugin for Microsoft Word. There is also a Google Chrome extension available for Grammarly.
No matter how you use Grammarly, it will surely help you out a lot if English is not your native tongue, if you are not good at grammar or if you are not someone who writes often. Of course, Grammarly won’t help you get every error out of your text, but it will surely help you make it more readable. Grammarly is a must-have for every student.
3. StayFocused
To be very productive and finish a writing assignment on time, one has to stay focused, and no tool can help you do this better than StayFocused. To get distracted, it all starts with one “harmless” ping on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram that you think you can quickly check and then get back to your writing work. Next thing, you know, it’s five hours later, and you’re on Pinterest, Quora, YouTube, and other time-wasting websites.
Do you know how much writing work you could have done in that five hours? If you have this problem, then, you need StayFocused as this Google Chrome extension stops you from procrastinating by limiting the amount of time that you spend on these websites.
4. Hemingway Editor
When writing an assignment, style can also make the difference. This is what the Hemingway Editor helps you with. Students who aren’t adept at writing end up making a lot of styling errors. Sometimes, they repeat words too much, write very long or complex sentences, use complex words when a simple alternative is available or use a lot of passive voice.
The Hemingway Editor is like the checker for these things. It makes your text more readable, something which will definitely earn you more marks since every word will allow your professor to focus on the substance of your paper.
5. WordCounter
Every writing assignment comes with a word limit that you should not exceed. If you want to know how many words your assignment contains and/or edit the word count when you have exceeded the limit, then WordCounter is for you. The tool is easy to use as well; you just copy all the text from the program you used to write your assignment and paste it into the text editor. If you have the Grammarly extension installed for Google Chrome, you can use that to make sure you make no grammar mistakes when adding or deleting the text.
The life of a student is already hard enough without having to worry about being productive once given a writing assignment. With the right professional writing tools, any student can increase their productivity and get an assignment done online timely. The free writing tools listed above are a good place to start.
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