Did you know that the average college student spends around 8 to 10 hours per day on a mobile phone? While a majority of that time is spent talking, texting, and spending time on social media, a lot of it is spent on coursework, too.
It’s easy to see that knowing how to write is important, but finding a way to build your skills that emphasizes your proclivity for technology is important, too. Fortunately, there are all kinds of ways you can improve your writing skills by using the e-learning tools that are available to you.
And for the times when you just need a quick fix, you can always buy coursework online. If you want to buy coursework online for the class in your university, you won’t find a better option than Studybay.
For some people, writing is an innate talent, but for others, it takes a lot of work to master the craft. In this post, we’ll give you some ideas of how you can improve your writing skills with e-learning resources and tools.
E-Learning Tools to Help Improve Your Writing Skills
If your long-term goal is to become a better writer, these e-learning tools will help you build your skills over time.
Class Central
Class Central is a publication that specializes in all things education. It publishes a frequently updated list of courses that you can take online to build your writing skills.
Many of these courses are available for free, as they are part of a large network of MOOCs (massive open online courses).
You can search for writing classes based on a specific category – such as basic writing and composition, journalism and blogging, or even resume writing – or you can browse a large listing of comprehensive courses to suit any preference or skill level.
Lifehack
This simple article by Lifehack has all kinds of tips to help students become better writers.
Some of the most important ones? Proofread, conclude something, and focus on communicating your purpose. Pin these tips to your desktop so you can access them at any time you sit down to write. Smart!
ReadWriteThink
If you’re a college student, ReadWriteThink may not be the most helpful resource for you. However, it’s extremely valuable for students in grades K-12, as it has all kinds of games, activities, and resources to help you become a better writer. They’re fun to play around with!
Helping With Writing
Help With Writing is a website that was created specifically to help parents support their children in developing stronger writing skills. However, you don’t have to be a parent to benefit from the resources provided on this site. You can use the grammar, spelling, and punctuation lessons to help yourself out, too.
Quill
Quill is a tool that’s perfect for e-learning. It is home to all kinds of free interactive writing activities. Again, this is a resource that’s geared toward younger writers (usually those in high school), but it is also helpful for English as a Second Language learners too.
The website is home to fun features like a two-player writing challenge, sentence shuffler, proofreader, and even a grammar checker.
750 Words
This website helps you improve your writing skills in a way that’s incredibly helpful for visual learners. You’ll be able to use a mind map style-search tool to find meanings for words and get ideas for related words and concepts, too.
Think of it as an artistic thesaurus! You can also make progress toward your writing goals by working toward an ultimate goal of writing 750 words each day (hence the name).
Udemy
Udemy is one of the world’s most famous MOOCs. It has all kinds of free and low-cost courses you can take to improve your writing skills. You’ll find just about every writing topic imaginable covered here, from creative writing to editing, copywriting, content writing, business writing, and more.
Coursera
Like Udemy, Coursera is an MOOC with all kinds of low-cost courses for you to choose from. Not all of these are free, but many are – take a look!
ProWritingAid
Without a doubt, ProWritingAid is one of the most helpful tools out there to help you improve your writing as you work. You can install it on your computer and for each text you write, it will perform automatic checks to look for things like.
- Cliches
- Redundancies.
- Overused words.
- Repeated phrases.
- Overuse of glue words and adverbs.
- Passive tense.
- Vague or overly complex words.
…and much more! For each mistake you make, ProWritingAid will tell you exactly what needs to be fixed, how, and why.
One-Time Writing Tools to Use
The e-learning platforms and websites listed above are all helpful resources that can help you become a better writer over time. However, if you’re hoping to polish off a paper you’ve already written in order to get it submitted in time to make your deadline, then you’ll want to check out these fast tools.
They may not help you become a better writer, but they can certainly make the finished product better! Take the time to review the issues that each tool finds with your document – by looking closely at where you made mistakes this time, you can become a better writer in the future, too.
Word Counter
Need to know if you’re using the same word over and over (and over and over and over) again in your text? Word Counter to the rescue! This program scans for frequently used words and lets you identify major keywords and repetitions in your text.
Hemingway App
The Hemingway App, named after the famed Mr. Ernest Hemingway himself, is a useful tool that you can use to check your piece’s readability.
This is especially helpful for writers who find themselves prone to composing texts filled with cliches, over-complex writing, and long, difficult-to-read passages.
Grammarly
Grammarly is an incredibly beneficial writing tool that you can add to your mobile phone or desktop browser. It looks for any and all issues in your text – including plagiarism, spelling issues, grammatical mistakes, punctuation errors, and much more.
With each mistake that is marked, you’ll have the option to either accept the change or to read more about why the program is suggesting such an edit.
We recommend that you take the time to read why each error was flagged. That way, you can learn from your mistakes over time. Of course, Grammarly also allows you to ignore the suggestions it makes – but what’s the point of having it there if you’re just going to ignore it?
Twinword
Do you find that you often get stuck writing – simply because you can’t think of another word to use? Twinword is an intelligent software that detects pauses as you are writing, then analyzes the context to give you real-time suggestions of other words you can use.
It also has a tone analyzer, thesaurus, word counter, and more.
Copyscape
Last but not least is Copyscape. While there are rare occasions in which a student actually means to plagiarize, most of the time, plagiarism is done accidentally. Enter – Copyscape. This tool will scan your document to make sure it doesn’t match any other existing content on the web.
