Have you ever tried engaging students in the process of essay writing or touted the benefits of reflexive blogging to a colleague only to be told, ‘I hate writing‘ or ‘I don’t have time for that‘? If you’re someone, like me, who loves to write then it can be hard to resist the logical response – ‘writing makes you a better person‘ – which I only recommend if you looking to fast track your unpopularity. If you’re looking for an alternative strategy, then try getting your students to road test a variety apps for writing and related tasks. Since everyone love apps (apparently), try using them as a covert introduction to teaching them the various skills that good writers require. Whether its brainstorming, journaling, researching, note-taking, pre-writing, concept-mapping, referencing, gramma, vocabulary, editing, proofing, digital publishing or managing and storing your documents, there’s an app designed to help you to manage, complete and perfect every step of the process.
Here’s an app bundle I have curated for my students and colleagues. It features tools that will help you turn thought into thesis, reckoning into rhetoric, perspective into prose and comment into critique. And there’s lots more these apps can do, which doesn’t need to be alliterated. All apps and services listed below are free to use or offer free versions with some user restrictions.
If you like this post then you should check out the other posts in this series of resource roundups I’ve put together for my students and colleagues: Apps for Presentations, Apps for Creativity, Apps for Content Curation and Essential Apps for Students.
The Essential Editing Tool for Writers. Do you want to edit faster and more efficiently? Join over 300,000 writers who use ProWritingAid to strengthen their writing and get published. Try it for free today.
The best digital handwriting on iPad. Penultimate combines distraction-free, natural handwriting and sketching with the power of Evernote’s sync and search. Take class or meeting notes, journal your thoughts, or outline your next big idea—in the office or on the go. From the first stroke, Penultimate makes the experience of pen and paper more productive.
Power Thesaurus is a free, fast, comprehensive and easy-to-follow online thesaurus dictionary for writers.
Dropbox is a cloud storage solution that works the way you do. Get to all your files from anywhere, on any device, and share them with anyone.
Create and edit web-based documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Store documents online and access them from any computer. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files.
The world's most popular dictionary and thesaurus with definitions, synonyms, antonyms, idioms, word origins, quotes, audio pronunciations, example sentences and Word of the Day! Look up the meaning of words, slang, phrases, idioms, and abbreviations in our free English Dictionary. This app works offline so you do not need an internet connection.
Wordpress helps you create a free website or easily build a blog on WordPress.com. Hundreds of free, customizable, mobile-ready designs and themes. Free hosting and support.
Grammar, Plagiarism, and Spelling Check; Free Online Proofreading; No Downloads...Allows you to find those pesky mistakes and correct them before your teacher does...
FlipSnack is everything you need to easily publish captivating online magazines, transforming your pdfs into online flipbooks. It works and looks great across all digital platforms, engaging your customers with interactive experiences and making it easy to sell directly from the pages of your digital publication.
Create and self-publish books, magazines & ebooks.
Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking website that allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.
Capture your thoughts and discoveries, with OneNote, your very own digital notebook. Use OneNote to write, draw, clip, scan, share and publish your ideas anywhere and from any devise.Get things done with your friends, family, classmates and colleagues. Share your notebooks with others for viewing or editing.
Boost reading and writing confidence across all types of content and devices, in class, at work, and at home! This is a plug in for Google Docs and Google Chrome users.
Word Dynamo combines addicting games with Dictionary.com’s entire word library empowering students to master their vocabulary. With different game types including audio, flashcards, and definition matching, Word Dynamo creates a personalized learning experience suitable for students of all grade levels.
Automatically reference everything correctly with CiteThisForMe. Save your work forever, build multiple bibliographies, run plagiarism checks, and much more.
Let the writers help you write. Recycle texts from books, lyrics, movies — combine words into something new, original and beautiful. Creative Writer delivers language expressions for your writing sessions taken from actual books: best-selling novels, literary geniuses, traditional and modern poetry, movies, TV series, song lyrics, hip-hop, gangsta RAP and other sources.
A reading, authoring, and publishing platform allowing storytellers to structure and contextualize stories.
Medium is a place to read, write, and interact with the stories that matter most to you. Medium is an easy-to-use blog publishing platform. It’s great for people who want to quickly publish content without having to think about information display.
Instant grammar checker, pagiarism checker - online proofreader. Check your grammar right from your browser or Microsoft Office. Improve your writing in emails, documents, social media posts, messages, and more.
Bring your life's work together in one digital workspace. Evernote is the place to collect inspirational ideas, write meaningful words, and move your important projects forward.
A plagiarism check will determine if content from your paper appears in other online sites and books and provide promptly generated plagiarism reports. All standard file formats accepted.
Create tree documents for clarity focus and flow when writing large documents like your book, novel, screenplay, thesis or research paper. Or use it to organise ideas for your blog, a creative project, personal todos or your development workflow or study notes.
QuillBot's paraphrasing tool is trusted by millions worldwide to rewrite sentences, paragraphs, or articles using state-of-the-art AI. QuillBot's summarizer can condense articles, papers, or documents in a short paragraph. Our AI uses natural language processing to grab critical information while maintaining the original context. Use QuillBot online or get the plugin that integrates directly into Microsoft Word, Google Docs and Chrome Extension. No more switching windows every time you want to Paraphrase text!
Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.
No longer must you surrender modern luxuries, like the DELETE key, to enjoy the look, feel, and sound of good, old-fashioned word-processing. Each document crafted in Hanx Writer can be emailed, printed, and shared and has its own unique statement-making personality.
Blogo is a desktop blogging app for Mac and makes it easy to write, publish and manage multiple blogs. Edit images, manage comments, work in offline mode or connected to WordPress & Evernote.
Use this free headline analyzer to write awesome headlines for blog posts and email subject lines that drive social shares, traffic, and SEO value.
MOOD instantly personalizes everything you want to say. With MOOD you style your texts as you write them, with a huge number of filters, fonts, illustrations, backgrounds making them creative and original.
When inspiration happens, put it on Paper. Paper is the best way to capture and connect your notes, photos, and sketches. Create checklists, spotlight details in photos, and sketch diagrams with unbeatable speed and ease — Paper is like a wall of sticky notes for everything that inspires you.
A writing tool like nothing you have seen before: plan, edit and share your work. Manuscripts helps you get started on the right track. The app understands the format you need when submitting to your target journal. It can even warn you of missing sections, violated word limits, and many more factors affecting your submission. Import your reference library. You can easily export a version of the document in all the expected formats: MS Word, PDF, Markdown, HTML, even LaTeX.
Use this HTML editor to create HTML pages for your website. The editor generates the HTML code for a full web page, but you can always remove any unneeded code as required.
Free weblog publishing tool from Google, for sharing text, photos and video. Free templates/ themes and gadgets/ widgets included.
ISSUU is a digital publishing platform and features 1000s of quality magazines and books which can be read online for free.
The Atavist platform lets anyone create rich, layered, multimedia stories and publications for the web and mobile. We built this easy-to-use, cloud-based publishing software to power The Atavist Magazine, our own award-winning publishing venture. Now Atavist is home to tens of thousands of publishers, brands, non-profits, writers, and storytellers of all stripes who want to create beautifully designed, innovative stories.
This is a Google Chrome plugin that allows you to use speech recognition in ANY text box on ANY website. Works really well with Google Docs.
Focus Keeper helps you keep your productivity high avoiding burnout using the timer. Work with time. Not against it!
Automatic works cited and bibliography formatting for MLA, APA and Chicago/Turabian citation styles.
Welcome to Viper - a leading alternative plagiarism checker which, using its range of powerful features, will help you check for plagiarism and duplicate content in your work.
Joomag is a FREE service for creating digital interactive content, including digital magazines, photo albums, catalogs and e-books. All this is possible right from the website using our innovative online editing tool.
Zotero is a powerful, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources and then share the results of your research.
Easily organize your papers, read & annotate your PDFs, collaborate in private or open groups, and securely access your research from everywhere.
Download free Acrobat Reader DC software, the only PDF viewer that lets you read, search, print, and interact with virtually any type of PDF file.
Check your content with Plagiarism Checker X. A special software for Students, Teachers and Professionals to find the duplicate content.
The first ever Authoring and Publishing Services platform for scholarly writing.
Used by over 800,000 writers, Writer is the coolest, fastest, distraction-free writing app around. It's just you and your words.
Hemingway App is a program that highlights common text errors. You can use it to catch wordy sentences, adverbs, passive voice and complicated words. If you see a yellow highlight, shorten the sentence or split it. If you see a red highlight, your sentence is so dense and complicated that your readers will get lost trying to follow its meandering, splitting logic — try editing this sentence to remove the red.
Linguistic search engine and smart translator that helps you to find the perfect word or sentence to express your ideas.
Free speech to text dictation software in a browser.
A simple tool for saving web pages to read later on your iPhone, iPad, Android, computer, or Kindle.
Polish and improve your writing everywhere you communicate online. Make your writing bold and clear. This app highlights complex sentences, adverbs, passive voice and possible simplifications in any web page.
Dr Taylor, I really appreciate your bundle of useful writing apps, thank you for your time you’ve spent and efforts that you’ve made to create this.
Are you updating your list from time to time? In my opinion, you can add Power Thesaurus (https://www.powerthesaurus.org/) and Unplag (https://unplag.com) to the list. The first is created by writers and authors, and will be helpful for students’ vocabulary development. The second is a plagiarism detector with a real-time Internet check. It will help your students to find their own unique writing style and be academically honest with their writing.