Imagine a world with no Internet:
No social media to learn trends and communicate with friends; no Google to search for quick answers to your questions; no websites and global marketplaces to sell/buy products or promote your services to the community.
And no online tools to assist you once you need help with work or study.
Look:
We never know the value of water till the well is dry. Useful online tools are many, and their features can impress even the most avid skeptics. While some specialists in academia worry about the negative impacts of AI-generated instruments on students’ academic integrity, communication, and writing skills, they can’t deny the obvious:
Online tools and services for academic needs revolutionize the education niche. When used right, they can help students grow skills and achieve career success in many creative fields.
In this article, we’ll share five pieces of advice on how to write better in college using online tools and, at the same time, not violating academic integrity or hurting your skills.
1. Use Them to Write Essay Drafts
How many online writing tools do you know? Some are for organizing your writing ideas; others help with thesis statements or outlining your future texts. There’s also a separate subcategory of distraction-free writing tools: You get a black sheet of paper on the screen, with no background noises or formatting options, so that you can focus on the writing process.
With AI technology on the rise, we have many tools to save you time in crafting your essays’ first drafts. For example, with this tool, you can generate a rough draft based on the topic and other instructions you provide. It will take a minute, and all you’ll need to do is revise that draft and polish it for better quality, originality, and your writing voice.
❗ Academic advice: Avoid copying the tool’s essay and submitting it as yours for the teacher’s or editorial review. Use it as your basement for further investigations.
2. Try Online Tools to Enhance Research
College students and everyone working in academia understand the role of in-depth research in writing high-quality papers. Every essay you write requires arguments and relevant evidence (facts, data) to support them. Online tools can be great assistants to help you find and analyze resources you’ll later use as references in your papers.
Thus, tools like Mendeley, Tableau, or Scholarcy allow you to find up-to-date documents on your topic. Same as ChatGPT, they extract the information from online resources, summarize it, and provide you with a list of sources to consider for your work.
It saves a lot of time on searching, reading, and analyzing dozens of scientifically proven works to choose a few for your essay.
❗ Academic advice: Don’t take the tool’s replies for granted. It can make mistakes, too. Sometimes, a tool presents false information as accurate; sometimes, it shares obsolete or biased data. Recheck what you get to your query and revise it if necessary.
3. Check Your Essay’s Grammar
Use corresponding online tools (Grammarly is a palmary example) to review your drafts for spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors. More than that, a new generation of AI-based checkers can also analyze the clarity, style, and readability of your writing works:
Not only will they fix a wrong tense, conjunction, or semicolon in your text, but they’ll also suggest improvements like simplifying overly complex sentences, revising word choice, removing run-ons, eliminating repetitions or redundant phrases, and much more.
❗ Academic advice: Reread your essay draft for typos and spelling mistakes, even if the tool says everything’s correct. There are still some details in the English language that spellcheckers won’t consider an error, but they influence the context of your work. For example, you can write “there” instead of “their” or “they’re.” All variants are correct, but, as you understand, their meanings vary.
4. Ask Them to Detect Plagiarism
Copyright infringement and academic integrity violations are critical issues in today’s world of online content and public text generators. That’s the reason plagiarism checkers are among the most popular tools for students and content creators:
They will help detect copy-pasted elements of your works and fix them for better originality. Even if you didn’t intend to copy others’ texts, unintentional duplications still have a place to be. Use reputable plagiarism checkers to ensure your essays are free from accidental copyright infringement.
❗ Academic advice: Use an AI detector together with a plagiarism checker. Most educators and online publishers scan the text they get to ensure they aren’t AI-generated. Even if you write a draft from scratch, detectors can see some abstracts as “written by AI;” do your best to revise accordingly to prevent unfair accusations.
5. Use Tools to Manage References in Your Papers
AI-based tools can help you format essays and other papers according to the rules of academic writing. You can organize citations with their help and generate references in APA, MLA, or any other citation style.
Also, consider them for crafting bibliographies and locating in-text sources for your papers.
❗ Academic advice: Address your assigned citation style’s manual to ensure your online instrument is error-free. The formatting details between APA and MLA are so tiny that one wrongly placed comma or capital letter can ruin everything.
So, What’s Next?
With so many online tools available, take some time to choose the most reputable and fitting for your writing needs. Whether you write essays, research papers, blog posts, or journalistic articles, instruments like grammar- and plagiarism checkers, writing ideas generators, or text generators can help you save time and organize your writing project for better results.