CustomWritings.com is an academic writing service which provides custom written papers to help students with their grades. Moreover, do not miss an opportunity to turn to writing guides, topic ideas, and samples on their blog to polish your writing skills. Except for these, you can also benefit from free tools that will ease the entire writing process – free plagiarism checker, citation generator, words to pages as well as words to minutes converter when you are working on a speech.
Blogs
- Copyblogger: On Copyblogger, Brian Clark offers tips on how to improve the content, marketing, and business of a blog. A must for any writer hoping to gain readership in the digital sphere.
- The Creative Penn: Joanna Penn offers up her insights on writing, publishing, and book marketing on this useful blog.
- Evil Editor: Learn what not to do when submitting your work to an editor through this entertaining blog.
- Fiction Writing: This About.com blog is a great place to get some basics insights on how to write better fiction.
- Harriet the Blog: The Poetry Foundation maintains this blog, full of great reviews, news, and information about the poetic community.
- Jeff Goins Writer: Check out Jeff Goins’ regularly updated blog or download his free ebook, The Writer’s Manifesto, on this site.
- Problogger: If you’re looking to turn blogging into a career, this blog is a must-read, offering advice on everything from branding to building better content.
- Write to Done: This blog is home to hundreds of articles, all on writing, that can help you improve your skills at things like comedic writing, finding inspiration, and more.
- Writer Unboxed: Focusing on the craft and business of fiction, Writer Unboxed features numerous monthly contributors who share their own insights to the professional field.
- The Writers Alley: Lacking in inspiration? Pay this site a visit for a little lift, helping you stay on track with whatever you’re working on.
- Writer’s Digest: Learn how to improve your writing, find and agent, and even get published with the help of the varied blogs on this site.
- Copyscape: Use this free service to learn if anyone has plagiarized your work.
- Creative Commons: Creative Commons provides free tools that let you easily mark your creative work with the freedoms you want it to carry.
- Intellectual Property Law: This list for online resources that focus on intellectual property will keep you busy for weeks. Some items focus on Canada, some on the U.S., and some on international law.
- Legal Guide for Bloggers: Here, The Electronic Frontier Foundation provides a summary of U.S. copyright laws as they apply to blogging.
- Performancing: This blog provides information that can help turn your blog into the prime marketing tool you need for your writing business.
- Preditors and Editors: Save time and money by avoiding the common publishing scams featured on this site.
- U.S. Copyright Office: Your writing is copyrighted the minute you’ve put it in a tangible form, but if you want further protection for your work you can register it here for a fee. The FAQ is free, however, and it’s the best tutorial around on copyright.
- Writers & Artists: This "insider guide to the media" offers industry advice for writers and articles through articles, interviews, competitions, and in an online community.
Citation and Style Guides
- APA Style: On the APA Style blog, you can get access to the fundamentals of American Psychological Association style, updates on specific style elements, and find loads of other reference material.
- Associated Press Style: If you’re working on a journalistic piece, you’ll need to use AP style. Learn the fundamentals from this guidebook on OWL.
- Brief Guide to Citing Government Publications: This guide provides examples of the most common government document citations. These examples are based on the Chicago/Turabian standard bibliographic style.
- The Chicago Manual of Style Online: The Chicago Manual of Style’s website includes an online forum, guidelines for basic rules, and even creates quick citations.
- Citing Sources: Learn how and why to cite your sources in this helpful guide from Duke University Library.
- Comic Art in Scholarly Writing: A Citation Guide: The serious scholarly analysis of comic art needs an equally serious way to cite that material. This is the scholar’s pop art guide to citation.
- The Economist Style Guide: Want to write for The Economist? Whether you do or not, these are some solid style rules for any journalistic writing.
- The Elements of Style: This classic book by Strunk and White is offered up in its entirety on Bartleby.com so you can improve your writing without spending a dime.
- Footnote and Citation Style Guides: You’ll find a vast array of citation styles for business, education, engineering, science, and social science from this useful resource compiled by Lehigh University.
- How to Prepare an Annotated Bibliography: This site will help you compile a bibliography when you’re ready to pull all those citations together.
- MLA Style: Not sure how to cite something correctly in MLA style? Use this online handbook to get started on doing things the right way.
- Turabian Quick Guide: Essentially the same as Chicago Style, this documentation system does have a few differences which you can learn about here.
- Common Errors in English Usage: Confused about whether to use lie or lay? Use this site as a guide to help you avoid some of the most common mistakes in English usage.
- English Practice: This site can help you practice English grammar and writing, even if you’re a native speaker.
- Grammar Girl: Grammar Girl is one of the most popular grammar sites on the web and is a great place to look for answers to all of your burning questions about proper usage.
- Grammar Handbook: The Center for Writing Studies at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana offers access to this incredibly useful grammar handbook that can ensure you’re getting things right in your writing.
- Guide to Grammar and Style: Written by Jack Lynch, this site provides grammatical rules and explanations, comments on style, and suggestions on usage that Lynch put together for his classes.
- Guide to Grammar and Writing: Choose from several modules that will help you to determine how to structure your writing with this tool created by the Capital Community College Foundation.
- How to Use English Punctuation Correctly: Punctuation can be confusing but on this site you’ll find a cheat sheet that can ensure you use your commas, semicolons, and quotes correctly every time.
- HyperGrammar: The University of Ottawa offers up a one-stop guide for proper spelling, structure, and punctuation on this site.
- The Tongue Untied: Head to this site to find basic instruction on grammar, sentence structure, word choice, and punctuation.
Tools
Merriam Webster: Visual Dictionary
The Visual Dictionary Online is an interactive dictionary with an innovative approach. From the image to the word and its definition, the Visual Dictionary Online is an all-in-one reference. Search the themes to quickly locate words, or find the meaning of a word by viewing the image it represents. What’s more, the Visual Dictionary Online helps you learn English in a visual and accessible way.
OneLook Reverse Dictionary
OneLook’s reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word.
GNU Aspell
GNU Aspell is a Free and Open Source spell checker designed to eventually replace Ispell. It can either be used as a library or as an independent spell checker. Its main feature is that it does a superior job of suggesting possible replacements for a misspelled word than just about any other spell checker out there for the English language.
WordWeb
A one-click English thesaurus and dictionary for Windows that can look up words in almost any program. It works off-line, but can also look up words in web references such as the Wikipedia encyclopedia. Features of the free version include definitions and synonyms, proper nouns, 150 000 root words and 120 000 synonym sets.
Wordcounter
Wordcounter ranks the most frequently used words in any given body of text. Use this to see what words you overuse or maybe just to find some keywords from a document. Text Statistics Generator is an alternative tool: it gives you a quick analysis of number of word occurrences.
Advanced Text Analyzer (requires registration) This free tool analyzes texts, calculating the number of words, lexical density, words per sentence, character per word and the readability of the text as well as word analysis, phrase analysis and graded analysis. Useful!
Graviax Grammar Checker
Grammar rules (XML files containing regular expressions) and grammar checker. Currently only for the English language, although it could be extended. Unit tests are built into the rules. Might form the basis of a grammar checker for OpenOffice.
txt2tags
Txt2tags is a document generator. It reads a text file with minimal markup as bold and //italic// and converts it to the formats HTML, LaTeX, MediaWiki, Google Code Wiki, DokuWiki, Plain text and more.
Markdown
Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). Requires Perl 5.6.0 or later.
Sources:
https://nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk/free-resources/
https://oedb.org/ilibrarian/150-writing-resources/
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/50-free-resources-that-will-improve-your-writing-skills/