Being a university student is not easy. One minute you were in high school, living at your parents’ house, and the next thing you know, you are in a foreign place surrounded by strangers, forced to live in the adult world. It can be incredibly overwhelming at times. You have so much to yet experience and everything is all brand new. Not to mention the workload is ridiculously demanding.
Every university freshman struggles with these new adjustments. One thing that catches many off guard is the strict writing parameters for courses. At university, everything is taken seriously, formatting, word count, title pages, tone, language, and most importantly, referencing. It is no doubt that writing in college is difficult, but here are three very useful and helpful tools that might just make your life a lot easier.
Table of Contents
Google Scholar
Knowing how to conduct good research is among the most lucrative skills you can possess. Google Scholar is a Web search engine that searches specifically for scholarly literature and academic resources that students or other academics use in their writing.
Google Scholar works just like regular Google, you type what you are looking for into the search bar and Google Scholar lists the most relevant results first, based on the source’s full text, author, source, and the number of times it has been cited in other sources. When you are a student at university, the amount of academic writing you have to do is hard work. Citing blogs and magazine articles is not considered professional or academic in the slightest.
Most papers require you to cite academic sources exclusively. Google Scholar is a good start for conducting academic research. It has thousands of accessible, peer-reviewed, and published articles and you do not need to sign up or create an account. One life-saving feature is the citation feature. Google Scholar allows you to copy and paste the full citation for any article you would like to use.
It references HTML, Harvard, Chicago, MLA, and APA format. This platform also gives you a list of related titles that you can browse if you are running out of ideas for a big report or if you would like to explore a certain topic in greater depth.
Google Scholar searches the same kinds of scholarly books, articles, and documents that you can find in your Library’s catalog and database, however, it is especially good at Finding “gray literature” such as transcriptions, certificates, or conference proceedings. This makes Google Scholar unique, as it includes a lot of articles that wouldn’t get included in most other indexing services such as the university library.
Grammarly
Launched in 2009, Grammarly is a very helpful tool if you are a university student. It is a “writing assistant” that students, writers, or other professionals can use to proofread and edit their documents. Grammarly checks for more than 250 types of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, and it enhances vocabulary usage.
It also has very useful features such as detecting writing styles (business, academic, casual, technical, creative, and general), detecting tone (formal, informal, optimistic, forceful, analytical, etc.), correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery. Grammarly fully analyzes your paper and walks you through how to make it better.
The software gives you an overall score on your paper based on the number of issues and errors it’s found. Then, it walks you through how to fix them, in order of appearance one at a time, giving both short and long explanations for each issue that’s identified. Grammarly also gives analytics on your paper such as word count, character count, amount of sentences, reading and speaking time, and a percentage of rare and unique words you have used.
It also provides you with a readability score based on your average word length and sentence length. Another cool feature that is part of the free version of Grammarly is the writing goals. You can identify what audience you intend to write to (general public, knowledgeable, or expert), the formality (informal, neutral, formal), tone, and intent (form, describe, convince, or tell a story).
Being proficient in all of the previously listed things will definitely make a resume stand out. Grammarly also stores all of the papers you have uploaded so you can always revisit something and this also enables you to free up some storage on your laptop as you do not have to keep all your old papers downloaded. This software is incredibly helpful, so it is no surprise that over 30 million people have used it since its launch, 10 million have downloaded, and there are roughly 7 million daily active users.
The Pirate Bay
You might think that this is a pretty unconventional suggestion. However, when you look at the needs and requirements of students, you will understand why we are suggesting this. For starters, students need to work with several productivity software tools. They can easily download and install the same using thenewpiratebay.
Additionally, most students tend to improve their learning and knowledge using eBooks. However, paying for the same does not make a lot of financial sense for students that are already struggling with limited financial resources. They can use the site to download all the eBooks that fit and satisfy their requirements.
Finally, studying all day can dull the mind which seeks some basic level of relaxation. For this, the site can help you with the latest movies and tv shows. The best part is that all these things are completely free and can help students with great value.
Cite This For Me
One of the things that university students struggle with the most is citing their sources. Plagiarism is absolutely not tolerated at any university or professional establishment. If a student is caught plagiarizing, the penalty, in most cases, is expulsion. This is a very serious matter, and in order to write a good paper, you need to have multiple sources to back up your claims and statements.
A lot of students fall into the trap of plagiarism when they fail to inform the reader where their information came from. There are dozens of citation generator websites online, however, Cite This For Me is by far the most popular. This website cites Harvard, Chicago, MLA (9th edition), APA (6th and 7th edition), AMA, IEEE, ISO 690, MHRA (3rd edition), OSCOLA, Turabian (9th edition), and Vancouver format.
You can even reference clips from YouTube, blogs, news sites, and other video sources. This software will automatically cite the appropriate style when you are using video references. Cite This For Me is a great tool when writing a paper or creating a presentation as it allows you to quickly put together a reference list from a very large database, and then copy and paste your fully formatted bibliography using any reference style of your choice.
Recently, this platform created a feature where you can scan pages from a book or a printed copy of an article directly from your phone using their app. In addition to doing all of your referencing for you, Cite This For Me also educates individuals who visit their site by giving tutorials and explaining how citations work.
You can read about each style of referencing and learn to do it yourself from scratch to avoid any errors the software might have initially missed. It also gives a large list of referencing guidelines by school for each style.
It is highly recommended to check out this part of their website because Cite This For Me gives you free, step-by-step directions on creating a bibliography, in-text citation, differences depending on what type of source you are using, how to format everything properly, as well as the differences between each referencing style.
