Tools For Teaching Essay Writing: A Guide for Educators

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by Robert Morris

Have you ever wondered why your students don’t like writing essays? The most obvious reason is natural talent: some people have an intuitive tendency to express themselves well, while others struggle with words. However, the approach you make as a teacher also makes a visible difference in the work of your students.

Have you tried explaining the essay writing process in detail, supporting your instructions with practical examples? There are great tools that will help you do that!

Wridea – As an educator, you have a responsibility to inspire your students to get ideas. Wridea is an idea management service that features a collection of awesome brainstorming tools. Its users can write down ideas at any time, organize their thoughts, and come up with logical outlines for their essays. The collaboration feature is great; your students can discuss their idea entries with you and get effective recommendations throughout the writing process.

NinjaEssays – When you cannot find good examples of papers on the topic you assigned, the writers at paper writing service NinjaEssays.com can help. This service offers professional writing assistance with no plagiarism involved. You can rely on the writers for researching, writing, and editing purposes. With their help, you can create the perfect textbooks and essay samples that will guide your students throughout the process of academic writing.

The Story Starter – The first sentence is usually the most difficult one to write. All writers would appreciate getting a starting point. This tool generates ideas for short stories, scripts, plays, novels, or simply for fun. You can get as many random story starter sentences as needed until you find a suitable one.

Penzu – If your students practice their writing skills daily, they will achieve much better results with their academic papers. Penzu is a personal journal and online diary that will eliminate the stress of writing for a grade. Inspire them to write something every day and keep it just for themselves.

MixedInk – This collaborative writing platform is great for team projects. Your students can weave their best ideas into a single paper. The unique features of MixedInk include authorship tracking, which means that each contributor will automatically get credit for their input. In addition, the tool offers real-time suggestions and allows the group to identify the most popular ideas by providing ratings.

com – Your students can benefit a lot from Grammar Girl’s quick tips. Although this is an authoritative website that teaches proper grammar, it’s still friendly and convenient for young students. They can improve their English grammar, word usage, and punctuation with regular visits at this website.

Daily Writing Prompts – Your students cannot become better writers without diligent practice. Instead of forcing them to write an essay every day, you can make that activity fun by offering daily or weekly writing prompts for short compositions. The prompts are classified by month, so you can easily create a schedule of topics related to the season.

Evernote – This app will help your students note their ideas on the go, but will also inspire them to act according to the plan. Evernote can be used for writing short lists, collecting data for references, and transforming inspiration into a complete, properly-structured paper. Organizational skills, as an essential part of the writing process, are boosted thanks to Evernote’s features.

An inspirational speech on the importance of academic writing won’t be enough. Students’ interest in essays seems to be inversely proportional to the number of assignments they get. Thus, you have to rely on unconventional methods in order to motivate them to write better content! The 8 tools mentioned above will help you find the right approach.

The opinions and recommendations stated here are solely those of Robert Morris.      

Robert Morris is an online tutor, educator and writer. He holds a PhD in English Literature from  NYU. Follow him on Google+!

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