By EWN • Published: 29 Nov 2021 • 10:37
Depending on circumstances, academic writing may go well and easily, give you some hard time, or become a real pain in the neck. Sometimes this pain is so unbearable that some students descend to buying custom-written papers online. This is a quick fix that comes at a quite significant price, puts your academic reputation at risk, and, most importantly, doesn’t resolve the problem with improving your own writing – and the issue will occur over again. What’s the alternative? After all, no one will put together an original paper at no cost or provide absolutely free essay writing help…
Well, the alternative is almost always the same and has much in common with the “swim or sink” situation: learn and practice. Yes, it’s harder and time-consuming, but only in the beginning. If you stay true to your determination, not only will you drastically improve your writing skills but also gain confidence to guide you through virtually any academic storm. Fortunately, there are more than enough resources to help you navigate through any writing challenge absolutely for free!
With this thought in mind, we’ve collected 10 websites and tools students can use to get academic paper and essay help free to deal with the majority of issues college writing and/or editing may throw at you.
’Help Me Write My Essay for Free!’ – Heaven Helps Those Who Help Themselves
Basically, any free writing assistance can be attributed to four main classes – how-to guides, samples, tools to edit and proofread previously written texts, and specialized means (like dictionaries, glossaries, vocabularies, etc.). Some resources may combine utilities from various classes, providing comprehensive homework and essay help.
One may also mention tutoring. However, free tutoring is, for starters, not always available on the point of your interest. Then, it’s usually not as flexible as other tools. And finally, it’s much more prone to technical issues.
As a result, this article focuses on more reliable and 100% free resources. So, the next time you think, “I need help writing an essay for free,” you would have a precise idea of what exactly is required and where to look for it.
Instructional Free Essay Writing Help Online
This section is devoted to online resources where you can get free help with essay in the form of how-to guides and step-by-step instructions. Professionally written and designed materials often make you feel like you’re attending a tutoring session by a free essay writing helper.
Purdue Online Writing Lab
Chances are extremely high that the majority of students have visited this comprehensive resource at least once. No wonder, as it has loads of neatly categorized information on the writing process for all academic levels. Guidelines and how-to’s cover general writing and particular styles, grammar and text structure, avoiding plagiarism, and, of course, citation styles. The latter is rightfully considered to be Purdue OWL’s forte. The website scrupulously breaks down APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, AMA, and ASA styles and offers helpful citation generators for each of them.
All-in-all, this website is a one-stop-shop to get information on virtually any aspect of academic, subject-specific, graduate, business, job-search, and personal writing. On the other hand, because of the writing lab’s size and unconventional classification, it might take you a while to find specific information on writing, say, a research paper. Anyway, Purdue OWL is definitely worth bookmarking and visiting when you’re stuck with some writing issue.
PaperHelp.org
Actually, PaperHelp is a custom paper writing service (one of the oldest ones in the market) that can deliver entirely original academic works disguised as writing models within the pre-set deadline – for money, that is. However, since we focus on free services, you should turn your attention to the PaperHelp blog, especially to its How-to Guides and Topics & Tips sections. There, you would find:
While PaperHelp.org is not actually a full-scale writing guides database, their blog posts’ distinctive feature is that they clearly articulate exactly what most of the students literally need when looking for writing assistance right here, right now. Additionally, nice illustrations with a humorous undertone make the reading process less boring and stress out the main points.
CollegeEssayGuy.com
CollegeEssayGuy.com is a website by Ethan Sawyer, the author of the College Essay Essentials book. The resource focuses on promoting Sawyer’s online paid courses, workshops, and one-on-one consultations. Although he is mostly focused on admissions, application, and supplemental essays, the website’s ’The Free Stuff’ section and blog contain loads of helpful how-to guides, tips, webinars, podcasts, and downloadable materials. They all are written professionally and on-point. We’re sure that if you manage to cut off all the marketing stuff and skip selling traps set along the way, you will take away lots of useful information and actionable insights, some really eye-opening, into college essay writing done right. We only wish the website had a more consistent structure and a sharper built-in search engine to cut browsing time.
Learn by Example from a Pro Essay Helper Free
If someone in your social circle can be an effective free essay helper – lucky you! Many students stress out that their friends and parents in most cases just cannot provide competent assistance with writing or show how it’s done. In that case, the solution is using essay databases. Some of them are paid, but the majority provide essay help online free in the form of example papers students can use as writing models to follow.
WowEssays.com
The most essential criteria for a good online sample database are the size and quality of the presented papers. Arguably, the best website based on the combination of the above-mentioned features is WowEssays.com. The website’s free sample directory includes almost 100.000 items of all types and academic levels. You can either browse the database by topics or paper types or use a handy on-site search by keywords. There are several practical uses of this tool apart from just reading papers and getting a better idea of what a decent academic piece should look like, for example:
Additionally, on WowEssays.com you can find several dozens of free writing assistance tools, including grammar and readability checkers, topic and citation generators, essay summarizer, and others. Also, their blog has numerous guides to writing various types of essays. Finally, the full-fledged essay writing service is also in place – apparently, as a last resort for struggling students.
Yes, it’s them again. Yes, free services on their website were obviously created to support their main business, but that’s not the reason to avoid them if they’re great. Compared to WowEssays, the PaperHelp’s sample directory is really tiny – just several hundred entries. Overall, the directory features just 11 types of samples popular among students (essays, reviews, research papers, case studies, etc.) but isn’t equipped with any kind of search engine.
Yet, their quality is something you would hardly find in other services. Supposedly, this is because these papers were written by professional writers and field experts who otherwise do such work for money. That’s the reason behind why one might call this small database created according to the ’less is more’ principle.
Use Free Online Writing Help As-You-Go
Once you’ve read how to craft this or that paper and even found the model sample to follow, you still need to put it all together and churn out the completed piece. Here are several tools you will inevitably need along this thorny way.
Thesaurus
When you write a lot, you might notice that you keep using the same words and phrases over and over again. Of course, repetition is a great and quite frequently used literary device. However, it’s best to use it in poetry, not in academic writing. Thesaurus.com is basically a synonymizer, and it’s a quick and efficient way to grow your vocabulary and enrich your writing. You just enter the word, and the website returns dozens of words with the same meaning; various tabs include synonyms with regards to parts of speech or context. Thesaurus also displays the initial word’s antonyms, examples of its uses in a sentence, and related words. Overall, an awesome, amazing, fascinating, marvelous, incredible, wonderful, and marvelous tool! (You see how easy using this tool is 🙂 )
TheFreeDictionary.com
The Free Dictionary is a massive portal where you just type in the word, hit ’enter,’ and the website returns the aggregated search results from various authoritative sources. They encompass thesaurus, several dictionaries (general, medical, legal, financial, acronyms), encyclopedias, and idioms. The latter is, probably, the most useful feature for creative academic writing and just fun. Using idioms and aphorisms is a sure-fire way to liven and light up your writing. Due to a broad database and convenient content presentation, you would hardly find a better place to look for a relevant turn of phrase on the Internet.
UsingEnglish.com
If you’re an English as a Second Language (ESL) student, the Using English platform should definitely be bookmarked in your browser. This website is a great destination for learners who first of all want to improve their overall command of English, which will then positively affect their writing skills. Visitors can freely browse various glossaries, phrasal and irregular verbs, use grammar tools and text analysis, download e-books, and – fun! fun! fun! – take English quizzes, tests, and training online.
Websites That Help with Essays for Free and Add a Finishing Touch
Okay, you did it – you wrote your paper (with or without essay writing help)! But wait, that’s not all. If you don’t want to risk some points being deducted and chat with a teacher about how a drop of poison infects the whole tun of wine, you should meticulously proofread and edit the piece to rid it of mistakes. However, editing your own writing is not as easy as it may seem – that’s why even established authors hand out their works to professional editors. As this option is unavailable to the majority of students, they will need to look for such essay help for free. Fortunately, the Internet offers several great options to polish your paper at absolutely no charge (at least, when it comes to basic features).
Grammarly
Nowadays, Grammarly is almost a synonym to editing text by yourself – so popular and helpful this app is. Available online, via a browser add-on, an MS Word plug-in, and as a desktop app, the free Grammarly version requires registration. After that, you will be able to get writing suggestions on spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Although pretty basic, these features are totally enough to eliminate all glaring mistakes and typos. If you want to get extended suggestions on correctness and fluency, clarity and conciseness, engagement and vocabulary, and delivery and tone, as well as plagiarism detection, you will need to pay for a Premium subscription plan.
Hemingway App
While Grammarly is focused on errors, the Hemingway app is mostly about readability and style. Meant to make your writing clear and bold, this app is an absolute must-use for academic writing. In color-codes highlights, Hemingway just points out hard and very hard-to-read sentences; phrases that have simpler alternatives; the use of passive voice; and adverbs. All this functionality is wrapped into a simple, no-registration-required we b interface. However, unlike Grammarly, this app doesn’t suggest fixes – it only points out the places where your attention is needed. But you will have to find the solution (if you decide that it’s required) by yourself.
There’s also a paid desktop Hemingway app version. Geared mostly for quick text publishing online and collaboration, it can also be used without the Internet.
SlickWrite.com
Another proofreading tool worth knowing about is SlickWrite. First off, it is really free: no limited features, no trials, no premium version – just a completely free web-based interface or Chrome and Firefox extensions. The browser version has the 30.000-word submission limit, which should be absolutely enough for virtually any college written work.
How does SlickWrite help you improve your text? The grammar checker underlines wordy phrases, passive voice, adverbs but doesn’t offer alternatives or solutions. Structure and Flow tools provide insights into senrtences’ length and types and their distribution within the text, but all the conclusions you will need to make on your own. The Vocabulary tool is meant to help you avoid monotonous content, but if it’s there, you’d need to figure out how to fix it yourself. Finally, the most fun feature in SlickWrite might be the Associator that should allegedly help you create new metaphors via word associations. Yet, the enthusiasm dies down soon enough as, in most cases, associations and metaphors are weak.
Use these free tools and services whenever you get a chance to ease your writing task. But always remember that the key to better writing lies in more writing and more reading!
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