Do you feel depressed or puzzled every time you need to come up with a substantial piece of writing? It’s not as complicated as you might think. To do writing magic tricks professionally, you’ll need a number of online assistants that will help you prepare for another essay, research or term paper at least three times faster.
You’ll find out where to find credible sources; fact-check the data you’d like to mention in your paper; structure your writing correctly; scan it for plagiarism to double-check citations you’ve written; spot spelling, grammar or stylistic mistakes and generate footnotes and a bibliography online.
Sounds great, right? So, let’s get started.
1. Use reliable sources to write well-researched papers
Taking little care with the sources you refer to in your writing is rather risky. Firstly, a teacher or professor can doubt the quality of your research, and not unreasonably, of course. Secondly, the sources might contain plagiarized information, which you then transfer to your work, running the risk of being accused of unintentional copycatting.
Still, you are on the safe side when using such resources as free-to-use government agencies. They are full of the freshest facts about a wide number of topics. As for the ones located in the USA, you can take advantage of census.gov with article topics ranging from “Population” and “Economy” to “International Trade.” Here, you can also find a great collection of visual aids, including infographics. Alternatively, you can use science.gov, which suggests lots of scientific news articles as well as a huge alphabetical list of science websites.
2. Find sources faster with academic search engines
Need certain books or articles? Why not try academic search engines that help you find scholarly material without showing irrelevant search results? These are books.google.com, which helps you look for online books or their reviews and compose your own online library, and scholar.google.com, which helps you search for particular scientific works with the help of keywords. Another option for scholarly searches is academic.research.microsoft. You can use different filter settings here: Search by fields of study, keywords, organizations, etc.
3. Clarify the meaning of unknown terms
When failing to use scientific terminology properly, you can also make your instructor question the authenticity of your work or knowledge of the subject you are writing about. That’s why you are sure to find these scientific online dictionaries helpful: thesciencedictionary.com and babylon.com.
4. Fact-check the information with online encyclopedias
Based on the Columbia Encyclopedia with more than 50,000 entries, encyclopedia.com, infoplease.com and questia.com are perfect fits for research papers. Each of the resources provides some extra goodies for its users: full-text books and articles, journals, magazines, online dictionaries, thesauruses and more.
5. Find out whether you’ve cited everything
With so many sources at your disposal, the main thing is to keep track of all of them. Missing even one, you again put yourself at risk of being accused of cheating, which is academic dishonesty that comes with a host of misfortunes ranging from failing a course to expulsion from the school.
To see whether you’ve attributed everything, run a plagiarism check with unicheck.com. It will flag all text passages that need citing. Exact text matches are shown both on an original source and in the paper you scan, making the process of source acknowledgment a lot faster.
6. Double-check your paper formatting
Measure twice and cut once when dealing with formatting your paper. There are so many details that can be left out by accident. The only thing you’ll need to do is to revise the guidelines for MLA, APA, Chicago or other styles used in your academic institution long before an educator notices any drawbacks.
7. Make citations, footnotes or a bibliography with just a few clicks
Thanks to citation generators such as bibme.org, you can finish routine work within minutes. It supports the most frequently used styles, including APA, MLA, Chicago and Turabian. This site lets you cite books, magazines, newspapers, websites, journals and even films. To create your works cited list, you need to select a style, enter the information on a source to be cited, and download the list. It’s as simple as that.
Citethisforme.com is another reference manager, letting you not only make bibliographies citing books, journals, websites, dissertations or even podcasts, but also search for topic ideas, run spelling and grammar checks as well as make a correct word choice. One more trustworthy citation generator is mendeley.com, which is compatible with iOS and Android and free for download on Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. This service can assist with generating citations and bibliographies along with storing all your research data in one place across all digital devices you use, and more.
8. Double-check spelling, grammar and stylistic mistakes
These tools are always in high demand. When in a hurry, you might make typos, grammar mistakes, or choose improper words. Free online proofreaders are not 100 percent accurate, but they can still be a valuable resource when you’re reviewing a text repeatedly.
Hemingwayapp.com is available for free in a mobile version and highlights sentences to show which ones are too difficult to read, while virtualwritingtutor.com corrects grammar mistakes, providing a commentary on why each correction has been made.
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