Harvard College Writing Center is a website that can be a useful tool for any person who is looking to improve writing skills and find information to help fine-tune skills they already possess. The website has free access for the public, however, it’s specifically geared towards students that are at least on the high school level, but can be helpful for many students. Their website is composed of various links that allow students to pick topics that can be useful to their academic ventures. It could also be useful for educators to give to their students to help them form proper habits when they are writing.
The skills that the website deals with a range from how to close read to how to write a comparative essay. The website’s topics cover material that every student will use in various subjects throughout their academic careers. For example, if a student needs information about outlining, they would find the tab labeled outlining and click on it. From there they would be directed to a page with an informational article about how to make a proper outline. In this specific example, the article’s sections include a definition, first steps in the process, generalizing information, and how to put it all together. Another useful section included in the example is what a standard outline will look like. Students would struggle with outlining can find helpful information on how to structure theirs.
Overall Harvard College Writing Center has set up a wonderful website that can be utilized to teach and guide students to strengthen their writing abilities. It can be the most useful to English students of all backgrounds as well as educators.
Writing Tutorial Services is a resource provided by the University of Indiana in Bloomington. Overseen by John Paul Kanwit, director of the Campus Writing Program at IUB, the Writing Tutorial Service offers academic help to students both on and off campus. Located at the Wells Library Info Commons at the University, the WTS provides both graduate and undergraduate tutors to students, however, they do not accept walk-ins, every student must schedule an appointment through the Service’s website. While in person help is only available to those registered at the university, the WTS also provides a variety of infographics and writing guides that are free for the general public to use. Subjects include advice on writing thesis statements, personal statements and academic letter, and writing book reviews. For example, in the guide “How To Write A Thesis Statement”, a step by step process is laid out to guide readers through the process of writing a thesis statement with and without a predetermined topic, listing examples of weak versus strong statements such as “World hunger has many causes and effects” in contrast to “Hunger persists in Glandelinia because jobs are scarce and farming in the infertile soil is rarely profitable” (Writing Tutorial Service). Additionally, the website provides information on common grammatical errors and ways to avoid plagiarism. The site is fairly easy to navigate with links to tutorials being displayed on their main page.
Works Cited
“How To Write A Thesis Statement.” Writing Guides: Writing Tutorial Service, 2011, wts.indiana.edu/writing-guides/pdf/how-to-write-a-thesis-statement.pdf.“
Grammarly is an online website that was founded in 2009 by Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmetro Lider. While the website itself was founded in 2009, the Web Editor was not launched until 2010. Grammarly has over two hundred team members and over twenty million daily users and can be accessed by everyone, for free, on Google, or just about any other search engine. The website offers three different accounts. The first account is their free account which helps improve and strengthen everyday writing. With the Premium account, they offer more advanced grammar checks, an advanced plagiarism detector, and enhanced vocabulary suggestions. The Premium account has a few different prices based on how you pay with their cheapest plan being the annual pay; it is $11.66 per month and is billed as one payment of $139.95. The last account they offer is their Business account which allows a business to buy the account and allow their workers to use Grammarly in order to make their writing more engaging and clear.
With a free account, they offer assistance with a multitude of websites including Gmail, Facebook, and other very popular sites. It will go through what has been typed in order to find mistakes or ways to improve the writing. If it finds a mistake or an improvement, it will underline the word or phrase and all the writer has to do is hover over the underlined portion with the mouse, and it will allow the writer to fix their mistake. In the account settings, they offer a tab to customize each user’s account by offering a personal dictionary, which allows a user to add words that they do not want to be flagged as a misspelling. They also offer to check writing in American, British, Canadian, or Austalian rules.
On a Macbook laptop, when visiting their website, they offer users the option to download Grammarly to Safari. If the user chooses to do so, they offer assistance on anywhere a user writes on the Web. This website would be useful to anyone that has to write. Students in college and high school could use this website to proofread their work before turning in an assignment. Anyone with a career that involves writing could use this website to make sure their writing is correct. This website was not intended for one specific audience but, instead, built for a wide audience in order to help everyone improve their writing.
Young Scholars in Writing, abbreviated YSW, is an academic journal that only publishes undergraduate writers. The essays, written by undergraduates, do not have a specific focus, but instead have a wide variety of topics. Their main subjects focus on rhetoric and composition, writing, literacy, linguistics, pedagogy, and cultural studies. It is an annual journal that began in 2003, published by the University of Missouri’s College of Arts and Sciences. The main editor is Doug Downs, but they have large editorial and peer review boards along with the main editor. The peer review board has only undergraduates from Montana State University while the editorial board has members from many different colleges and universities. The journal does not give an editorial board for each volume. Instead, they have one page on their website that lists the editorial board in full.
There are sixty-four articles submitted per year, but only seven of those sixty-four are published which is roughly an eleven percent acceptance rate. The articles are suggested to be ten to twenty-five pages in length with the only requirement that it is authored by an undergraduate student with a preferred MLA style editing. The journal does not include book reviews or short notes, and there is no charge for submission or pages. It is also actively indexed and peer reviewed. The earlier volumes seem to mostly focus on politics and writing and how it goes with different subjects. The very early volumes do not include abstracts of each article like the more recent articles do, but all of the articles give a biography of the authors which basically describes their position in college- where they were at in their college careers when they wrote the articles and what they are doing after the article is published.
While the earlier volumes do not contain abstracts, the titles give clear enough descriptions of what the author is writing about in order for a reader to know what they will be reading in the article. For example, while looking through the articles of volume three, a reader can tell exactly what Amanda Marshall will be writing about in her article “Rhetoric of Anorexia: Eating as a Metaphor for Living,” or what Rebecca Feldmann will be discussing in her article “Discovering the Truth: The Operation of Ethos in Anti-Smoking Advertisements.” While those two articles focus on writing in different aspects, articles like “Feminist Figures or Damsels in Distress? The Media’s Gendered Misrepresentation of Disney Princesses,” by Isabelle Gill, focus on a more political topic. The journal even includes topics on religion. One example being Natalie Selah’s article “Crafting Theology: Toward a Theory of Literacy Smiths.” Another example of religion in this journal is Madeline J. Crozier’s article “The Melting Pot as a God-Term.” There are also articles that focus on specific time periods, articles like “American Womanhood and The New Woman: A Rhetorical Consideration of the Development and Circulation of Female Stereotypes, 1890-1920” by Rachel Lynn Stroup. Staring in 2010, they had a section dedicated to showcase first-year writers along with other articles that have the normal variety of students. The wide variety of subjects within the articles of the journal would attract readers of all disciplines to read the journal.
For students that attend Tennessee Tech, the journal can be accessed through the library’s website. The link for the full text option allows students to access all volumes of the journal and all of the articles within each volume. For anyone else looking to read this journal, a simple Google search will take you to the Montana State University website where they house all volumes, and articles within each volume, in the archives tab. This journal is very useful for all undergraduates that would want a paper published in a journal,and it could also be useful to a range of students, or curious readers, if they are interested in any of the topics that are being published.
Theparisreview.org is a website affiliated with the quarterly literary magazine The Paris Review. The magazine was founded in Paris by Harold Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton in 1953, but the website didn’t make its debut until 1995. Nadja Spiegelman is the current online editor, though content on the site taken from the magazine would have originally been under its own editor, Emily Nemens. The site, geared towards enticing the reader to purchase a subscription to the magazine, offers limited access to the archived content on the website. Despite this, an abundance of free content can be accessed by anyone.
The homepage of theparisreview.org contains a mix of both free content and previews of content behind a paywall, though a section titled “The Daily” consists of daily articles that are available for free. The Daily began on June 1st 2010 with a letter from the editor stating the purpose of the daily posts were to keep readers engaged in-between issues of The Paris Review. All posts on The Daily since its inception are accessible and cover vastly different topics, from an article praising Peanuts cartoons to a recounting of an attempt to recreate Italian dishes mentioned in the novel The Leopard.
The site also features submitted fiction, poetry, interviews, and art/photography. While access to all of these requires a subscription, one work is featured daily in each category and can be freely viewed. Podcasts featuring interviews with writers and readings of their works are available, though the podcast is still somewhat new with only two available seasons. A video section links to the organization’s YouTube channel, which offers a few dozen relatively short videos. The majority of these videos feature authors discussing their first publication.
Poets.org is a website created in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, a nonprofit organization founded by Marie Bullock in 1934. It is funded in part by individual contributions and members, as well as government programs, private foundations, and corporations. Though Poets.org is run by President and Executive Director Jennifer Benka, a Board of Chancellors consults with the staff on creative matters and a Board of Directors oversees finances, programs, and plans for the future. While the Chancellors are exclusively poets, the Board of Directors consists of an eclectic collection of more executive occupations. The website offers a catalogue of poems, teaching materials, backgrounds on poets, local events, and literary job listings. The entirety of this information is available for free, unobstructed by advertisements, on their website.
Most prominently presented on the site is the poem-a-day service in which one may sign up and be emailed a selected poem everyday. The daily poem is displayed on the site’s homepage and includes a picture of the author along with a direct quote from them regarding the poem. The homepage also contains links to their collection of over 11,000 poems, ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to poets such as Gary Jackson who are still writing to this day. Information on the authors of these archived works is easily accessible through their archive of over 3,000 poets, though the amount available can vary wildly from poet to poet depending on their perceived status or tenure as a writer. Joy Harjo, one of the aforementioned chancellors on the site, has several paragraphs listing her accolades while details on Ashley Toliver are limited to two sentences.
Poets.org also offers more practical content in the form of lesson plans and suggested poems for teachers as well as a consistently updated list of literary and arts jobs that may be of interest to English majors. Though the site does include “poetry near you” events, the vast majority of the events listed are located in more densely populated areas, especially New York. The Academy of American Poets subsection of the website, somewhat hidden at the bottom of the homepage, links to programs, prizes, and awards offered by the site’s governing organization.
The Pure Writer application was created in December 2018 by the software developer, Drakeet. This application is an alternative to Google Documents and Microsoft Word for the phone only. This application is better and worse than other programs like Microsoft Word and Google Documents. Pure Writer offers easy access to different backgrounds and a backup option in the setting drop-down. This application is advertisement free, which allows the user to write in peace and without distraction.
This application is compatible on all smartphones and tablets and there is a desktop version. The desktop version of Pure Writer is available through the purchase of the Pro version of the application, which costs $3.99, but the desktop version of the application is still under development (Pure Writer- Never Lose Content Editor & Notepad). There are a few other tools available through Pro, for example the ‘Find and Replace’ mechanic, the ‘Custom’ theme option, and the ‘Preview Mode’ option (Bennett). There are other tools available on the non-Pro version of Pure Writer. The non-Pro version of the application offers a ‘Typewriter’ tool, a virtual assistant, a ‘History’ tool, themed backgrounds, a ‘Backup’ tool, and organization. The organization on the application allows the user to sort their writing into a ‘Chapter.’ Inside the chapters, the user can then sort their writing into a ‘Category.’ The categories can be moved and arranged to the liking of the user. The ‘Backup’ tool allows the user to save their writing to the application or to an external storage unit like the ‘Cloud.’ The application offers an array of themed backgrounds that the user can change to their preferences. The ‘History’ feature is a better version of the undo option. The user can scroll through previous saved points and choose which area to return to. The virtual assistant in Pure Writer is named ‘Time Machine’ and it is supposed to function like ‘Google Assistant;’ however, ‘Time Machine’ does not work that well. The ‘Typewriter’ function highlights the line that is being written and darkens the lines that are not being written, which allows the user to focus on the line they are writing (Bennett). The ‘Typewriter’ function can be turned on by going to the drop-down menu and selecting the box next to the term ‘Typewriter.’
Works Cited
Bennett, Brad. “Pure Writer is a mobile text editor designed by a writer for writers [App of the Month].” Mobilesyrup, Mobilesyrup, 5 May 2019, Accessed 25 Oct. 2019.
“Pure Writer- Never Lose Content Editor & Notepad.” Google Play, Google, 2019, Accessed 25 Oct. 2019.
Poet Assistant was created in 2016 by Carmen Alvarez (Google Play). The application assists poets with writing poetry by providing an accessible and easy to use ‘Dictionary’, ‘Rhymer’, a ‘Thesaurus’, and a ‘Random Word’ generator. A Desktop version of this application is not available at this time but, it is available on Android and Apple devices and its version number is v1.30.0. This application was made to be serviceable to its users by providing a dictionary, thesaurus, and a tool that rhymes words in one place. Poet Assistant provides free access to all of its functions and there are no advertisements in this application. This application contains a ‘Dictionary,’ ‘Thesaurus,’ ‘Rhymer,’ ‘Composer,’ and ‘Favorites’ function. The ‘Favorites’ tool allows the user to save words that they liked for later. The ‘Composer’ tool permits the user to type their piece of written literature, and the ‘Composer’ will read aloud what was typed. The ‘Rhymer’ feature searches for words that rhyme with the word in the search engine. The ‘Thesaurus’ function searches for synonyms and antonyms related to the desired word. The ‘Dictionary’ tool finds the definition of the word that was typed in the search engine. The ‘Thesaurus’ and ‘Rhymer’ tools, the definitions of the word are provided. Poet Assistant also has a ‘Random Word’ generator, which finds a random word for the user (Alvarez).
In the settings drop down, there are four categories, ‘Theme,’ ‘Layout,’ ‘User Data,’ and ‘Voice.’ In the ‘Theme’ category, the user can change the color theme of the application from ‘Light,’ ‘Dark’ or ‘Auto.’ The ‘Layout’ function allows the user to change the layout to ‘Clean’ or ‘Efficient.’ The ‘User Data’ category lets the user to import or export favorite words from Poet Assistant to other applications and devices. The ‘Voice’ section allows the user to change the pitch and speed of the voice that is part of the ‘Composer.’ The search history can also be cleared in this category. The application also has a ‘Share’ feature which allows the user to send information from Poet Assistant to any other application that accepts files from Poet Assistant (Alvarez).
Thesaurus.com is a website that not only provides synonyms to commonly used words but prompts to improve writing. The writing tool allows the writer to write or paste the document into “word swap” and useful synonyms are provided for words used too often throughout the document. Even though you might be able to simply use the thesaurus included in Microsoft Word there are other uses for Thesaurus.com than simply finding synonyms for a document.
Thesaurus.com includes a word of the day along with writing prompts that assist in the use of the “word of the day”. For example, the word of the day on October 23rd was erumpent and the theme for the word of the day in the week before Halloween seems to follow the holiday spirit with words such as macabre, ghoulish, and ghost word. One of the writing prompts is to see the definition of the word of the day and use it in a paragraph.
The writing prompts are not confined to the “word of the day” and include prompts on how to improve vocabulary, punctuation, grammar, and improvisation when writing any document. One of the articles that is shown daily is the importance of commas to make a sentence sound right. The writing article to improve writing on October 22nd focused on empathy and how it influences writing. While the writing article on November 1st focused on how to kill off a character when writing a story.
Thesaurus.com is published through Dictionary.com and has been available to the public for over 20 years. There is also an app for android and iOS devices for both Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com available for the public. This website connects to Lexico Spanish which is a site that shows a Spanish word of the day as well as tools to practice and study Spanish. This website is much more than just a thesaurus, it’s a tool for writers to improve and grow in their writing and for readers to strengthen vocabulary.
Google Docs is a free online word processor that is offered by Google as a part of its Google Driveservice. Within that free service and in addition to Google Docs, Google Driveservice also includes Google Sheets, a spreadsheet program, and Google Slides, a presentation program. Google Docs and its sister programs are accessible through an app on phones or computers, or it can be accessed directly through a search engine, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Internet Explorer. Therefore, Google Docs is widely accessible, in fact, Google’s mission as a whole is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (“Google Docs Online”).
In addition to its easy accessibility, Google Docs also offers many attractive features for students and english students in particular. The most popular features include commenting and real-time editing, unlimited revision history, the ability to work across devices with or without internet, easy-to-manage sharing controls, and integrated add-ons. Commenting and real-time editing are noteworthy features because they allow students to collaborate on the same document instantaneously, whether that be notes during a lecture, group projects, or papers. Also, it’s easy-to-manage sharing controls are a key feature that allow the user to decide who gets access to his documents and folders and grant certain individuals or groups the right to edit, view, or make comments. Additionally, the integrated add-ons allow a user to research topics, define words, and insert citations directly in the Google Docs document. All in all, Google docs is universal, easy to use, and more advanced than most typical word processors.
Google. “Google Docs: Online Word Processing for Business | G Suite.” G Suite: Collaboration & Productivity Apps for Business, gsuite.google.com/products/docs/?utm_source=google &utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=na-US-all-en-dr-bkws-all-all-trial-b-dr-1007175&utm_content=text-ad-none-any-DEV_c-CRE_337191507243-ADGP_Hybrid%20%7C%20AW%20SEM%20%7C%20BKWS%20~%20BMM%20%2F%2F%20Docs%20%5B1:1%5D%20Google%20Docs-KWID_43700009812540086-kwd-25567368937&utm_term=KW_%2Bdocs-ST_%2Bdocs&gclid=CjwKCAjwusrtBRBmEiwAGBPgE_qy5MMzrqaOM62xDFVFLLtvn_nwrEFDGEOC0jweeCdr3X6EF3R9ZBoCg44QAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds.
English Research Sources 