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Congratulations on finding the perfect sources for your academic paper! Now, take the next step towards crafting a flawless masterpiece with Yomu. Our AI writing assistant is your guide to refined, error-free writing. Edit your paper like a pro with real-time feedback and efficient writing tools. From research to writing, Yomu & Sourcely are your all-in-one solution for academic excellence.

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Welcome to Sourcely! Our AI-powered source finding tool is built by students for students, and this approach allows us to create a tool that truly understands the needs of the academic community. Our student perspective also enables us to stay up-to-date with the latest research and trends, and our collaborative approach ensures that our tool is continually improving and evolving.

Write essays 10x faster

Ai co-writer that helps students research, write, paraphrase and cite. effortlessly..

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Used by 230,000+ smart students from

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Mighty but simple AI co-writer

Use the power of chatgpt while keeping your unique voice and originality, outline generator.

Not sure how to start? Litero AI will suggest an outline for your specific topic.

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Got writer's block? Litero AI will seamlessly suggest the next sentence or paragraph.

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Add references and citations effortlessly in MLA, APA and other formats.

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Ideal for faster writing and better grades

Save time with our built-in tools every student needs for a perfect essay..

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Plagiarism Detector

Check your text for plagiarism with accurate results.

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Find and fix issues with grammar, spelling, punctuation, and more!

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People love Litero. And talk about it.

Litero has an intuitive interface, which I like. Its autosuggestions elevated my papers to a whole new level. It's like having a personal writing mentor always at my side, guiding me toward clearer, more impactful expression.

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As someone who strives for perfection in everything, Litero is a godsend. This tool helps me polish my academic writing to perfection, ensuring it meets the highest standards.

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Discovering this tool is gold for my postgrad education. After trying the free version, I upgraded to the paid one, and I can't help but regret not using this writing AI earlier. It's the real deal!

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Free essay and paper checker

A free essay checker or paper checker can help you boost your academic performance. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. Maybe you’re great at science, math, sports, or art, but writing essays has never been your forte. Or maybe you’re an excellent writer and you just need a quick proofread to make sure you haven’t overlooked any subtle errors. Either way, QuillBot’s AI-driven essay checker has you covered.

What is an essay checker ?

Proofreading your own writing often leads to frustration. It’s too easy to gloss over mistakes after you’ve read your work dozens of times. Using an essay checker for free is like having a professor who’s always available to give you feedback on a sentence that isn’t quite right.

An essay checker is a tool that examines any text you type into it and points out grammar and spelling errors. It also checks your punctuation and phrasing, then corrects any mistakes. The result is an error-free essay that you’re proud to submit.

When you’re writing for a grade, there’s no question you need to write well. At a minimum, that means using proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. QuillBot can help you achieve all of that, and did we mention it’s free? But it goes further to include these benefits, too:

Academic integrity

Consistency, learning opportunity.

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How does QuillBot’s essay/paper checker work?

You won’t believe how easy it is to use! When you need an essay grammar check, simply go to the QuillBot website and click on essay checker on the footer of the website. Paste your essay into the box, and within a few seconds, you’ll see lines appear under any part of the text that might need correction. Then, you have a choice: You can accept or reject each suggestion one at a time, or you can review the entire essay and then click Fix All Errors if you like all of the suggestions. A single click is all it takes!

Another way to accomplish your essay editing is to write your essay directly in QuillBot. Our handy formatting tools let you add headings, bold text, italics, and other details so you can compose an essay that’s neatly formatted while correcting errors in real time.

What can be checked in QuillBot’s essay evaluator

Our essay checker and corrector will help you spot the usual writing errors—misplaced commas, "their" instead of "there," incomplete sentences, and so on. But there’s so much more to good writing, and many free writing tools don’t quite get you there. These are a few examples of next-level mistakes that you can root out with assistance from QuillBot’s essay corrector:

Lack of fluency

As a multilingual English speaker, you might question whether your phrasing reads naturally to native English speakers. You can use QuillBot’s paper checker for free to solve this problem. It also accounts for different English dialects if, say, you need to convert your essay from US English to UK English.

Tricky plurals

Did you know the plural of thesis is theses? Did you know the plural of analysis is analyses (which is also the spelling of analyzes in UK English)? Did you know the plural of genus is genera? QuillBot does

If you need a new way to state an idea, QuillBot can help. Our Grammar Checker includes the Paraphrase Text button. Clicking it moves your text to the Paraphraser , where you can choose from tons of words and phrases that have the same or a similar meaning. It’s a great way to add nuance and interest to your writing or to find just the right word.

Unnecessary capitalization

Many writers capitalize words that are important but are not proper nouns. Capitalized text can be harder to read and make your paper look cluttered, so use QuillBot’s essay evaluator to make sure you’re capitalizing only the words you should.

Extra words

If you’ve ever been told you’re long-winded or your writing is “wordy,” QuillBot can help you write more concisely by suggesting you remove words that don’t add value.

Extra spaces

Still typing two spaces after a period? Our paper checker can help you find excess spaces and delete them. It also shows you when they appear in the middle of sentences or at the end of paragraphs.

Become a better writer with QuillBot’s writing tools

Besides a paper check, we have other writing resources you can take advantage of our other writing resources. Plagiarism is unacceptable when you’re writing an essay, so try our Plagiarism Checker. You might be interested in these as well:

Get a grasp on the main idea with our Summarizer.

Citation Generator

Help readers find your sources easily with the Citation Generator.

QuillBot Flow

Combine all of our useful tools into a streamlined word processor with the QuillBot Flow.

Get the help you need to make the grade

Use QuillBot’s essay checker for free online to ditch the stress and be confident you’re turning in an exceptional paper.

Trusted and used by top-tier institutions including:

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QuillBot essay checker FAQs

Quillbot’s essay checker is your complete essay checking tool..

Our free essay checking tool gives your essay one final review of usage, grammar, spelling, and punctuation. You can feel great every time you write an essay.

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Instantly corrects grammatical errors

Grammar, spelling & punctuation

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English, German, French & Spanish

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Unlimited essay checks

Slick Write

Check your grammar in seconds.

Slick Write is a powerful, free application that makes it easy to check your writing for grammar errors, potential stylistic mistakes, and other features of interest. Whether you're a blogger, novelist, SEO professional, or student writing an essay for school, Slick Write can help take your writing to the next level. Curious? See why Slick Write is the best. Try the interactive demo , or check your own document . No software download or installation is required.

Why Slick Write?

The grammar checker is lightning fast

Customizable feedback to suit your style

We do not redistribute your documents

Add impact to reports

Improve your grades

Engage your audience

Inspire confidence

English is a difficult language, so using correct grammar and diverse vocabulary will set you apart from the crowd. Using good sentence structure and wording improves your content's impact and readability while building your readers' trust. Slick Write goes beyond spell checking to teach you the habits of effective writers. How does your writing rate?

Improve your resumé

The job market is competitive. Gain an advantage, impress employers, and land more interviews by demonstrating professionalism and superior communication skills on your resumé.

Get the extensions

Using an extension is the easiest way to submit your work to Slick Write. They are available for Chrome and Firefox .

Bust your writer's block, and create new metaphors by playing the word association game . To begin, type a word or phrase in the box below, and hit enter. To quickly find associations for your own text, highlight a word or phrase in it, and use the toolbox popup.

The associator learns contextual word associations from real literature, so it may return offensive results.

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I know what I'm doing. Disable these hints.

  • Submission Limit There is a limit of 200,000 characters, which is approximately 30,000 words. Anything longer should be submitted in smaller chunks, or it will be automatically trimmed.
  • No document It looks like you forgot to enter your document. Paste it in and try again.
  • Structure This tab shows sentence structure within the context of the document. Hover over a sentence to see its word count. Select a word or phrase, or click a sentence to get more information.
  • Quotes This tab shows your quotations highlighted as Slick Write sees them.

More information »

  • Sentence type flow Pieces with good flow will make use of all four sentence types, varying them to keep the reader interested.
  • Sentence length flow Sentence length is indirectly related to sentence type, and is a good indicator of flow. Flow can be altered by adding, removing, lengthening, shortening, combining, or splitting sentences. Long sentences will be indicated by a red line on the graph. Sentences that flow poorly with their surroundings will be orange, and the source of the problem can often be found in a nearby sentence.
  • Word length flow Word length is a minor contributor to overall flow, but even minor variations are signs of good rhythm.
  • Passive Voice Index This is a measure of how frequently the passive voice is used. Consider revising your document if it scores over 100.
  • Prepositional Phrase Index This is a measure of how frequently prepositional phrases are used. Consider revising your document if it scores over 100.
  • Average sentence length Sentence length is a major contributor to the level of education required to read a body of text.
  • Sentence length standard deviation This is a measure of the amount of variation in the length of a text's sentences. In texts that have broad appeal, this tends to fall between 50 and 90% of the average sentence length. You can increase this number by making long sentences longer, and short ones shorter.
  • Sentence deviation to length ratio This is a measure of the sentence variety, and a major contributor to flow. Most novels score between 0.5 and 0.9, and popular ones often score near the high end of the range. You can increase this number by making long sentences longer, and short ones shorter.
  • Just the stats preset Use this preset when you're only interested in the stats tab. Critique and Flow will be hidden.
  • Honesty preset This preset checks for common indicators of deception, either by lying or omission, and is based on the findings of this study . Areas with high concentrations of these indicators should be viewed with skepticism. Note that the presence or absence of these indicators does not guarantee that a statement is true or false, and that the study was done on spoken communications, so it might be more applicable to interviews and speeches. As always, use your brain.
  • Doubled words A word used twice in a row may be a typo.
  • Commonly confused words This will check for the internet's most frequently confused words and notify you if it looks like you misused one. It is experimental and probably the least reliable feature. Consult a dictionary when necessary.
  • Sentences starting with the same word A word should not be used to start more than one sentence in a single paragraph.
  • Misplaced conjunctions It is considered poor style to place coordinating conjunctions at either end of a sentence. Placing a subordinating conjunction at the end of a sentence is against the rules.

It is said that one day, passive voice will bring weakness to your prose.

More information » Even more information »

  • Overwriting Words like "very" and "really" make sentences wordier and weaken your message. These can be deleted in almost all cases without affecting the meaning of the sentence.
  • Abstract words Abstract words lack specificity and overusing them can make even simple concepts difficult to understand. There are times when abstract words are desirable or even necessary; it would be difficult to write about math or programming without mentioning variables or functions, but you should use more specific terms whenever possible.
  • Wordy and redundant phrases These phrases make your writing more difficult to understand. In most cases, they can be replaced with one or two words, or even deleted.
  • Legalese These antiquated, arcane words and phrases will make your writing look like a contract.
  • Double negatives Double negatives are almost always poor style.
  • Adverbs They aren't bad in small quantities, but consider revising your document if more than 5.5% of its words are adverbs. Adverbs ending in "-ly" are considered the worst offenders.
  • Adjectives They aren't bad in small quantities. A few of the words on this list can also function as other parts of speech. You have been warned.
  • Contractions In formal writing, the use of contractions is considered a fault.

The boxer decked his opponent.

  • Profanity Profanity should not be used in formal writing outside of direct quotations.

The critic's scathing review hit the nail on the head .

  • Similes Similes and metaphors should be used sparingly. This option will detect most common types of similes.
  • "Said" replacements Some people think that these substitutes for "said" are weak or obnoxious, especially if overused.

Her dress was long , and it touched the floor.

Her long dress touched the floor.

  • Gender-specific pronouns Avoid using gender-specific pronouns in formal writing when the subject's gender is unknown.
  • Weasel words Like abstract words, weasel words and phrases lack specificity. At best, they convey uncertainty. At worst, they can be used to "weasel out" of telling the truth in a straightforward manner. When checking a document that is speculative by nature, you might want to disable this detector.
  • Third person pronouns According to this study , high concentrations of third person pronouns may indicate deception.
  • Bias language These words and phrases often show the author's bias.
  • Uncommon words Uncommon words will increase the document's reading difficulty.

Hot peppers burn my mouth, but I eat them anyway .

Since burritos taste good , I like to eat them.

  • Sentence fragments A sentence must have at least one noun and one verb. Anything that does not is a fragment, and if it occurs outside of dialog, it should probably be rewritten.
  • Long sentences Long sentences tend to be more difficult to read, making them good candidates for trimming or splitting. Alternatively, parallelism may be used to improve their readability, though this will not decrease the ARI score.
  • Success with Style: Using Writing Style to Predict the Success of Novels
  • Grammar Girl For your obscure writing questions
  • Basic Prose and Style Mechanics An excellent, concise resource
  • Television Tropes & Idioms Tricks of the trade
  • Writing Realistic Injuries An invaluable article for anyone who writes action or horror
  • Online Etymology Dictionary Learn the history of English words
  • Scribophile Discuss the finer points of writing with other novelists
  • Suggestions from the official See Sharp Press blog Learn about the mistakes that will keep your novel from being published.
  • Smashwords Easy ebook distribution for indie authors
  • Duotrope Find and learn about publishers
  • CreateSpace
  • Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing
  • Creative Writing Prompts and Exercises Spark your creativity
  • RhymeZone A popular rhyming dictionary
  • Seventh Sanctum Name generators and more
  • Apache OpenOffice The best free office software
  • Literature & Latte Makers of the popular Scrivener editor

Did you find a bug? Do you want us to add a new feature? We would love to hear about it.

  • Grammar Checker
  • Paraphrasing Tool
  • Critique Report
  • Writing Reports
  • Learn Blog Grammar Guide Community Events FAQ
  • Grammar Guide

Essay checker: free online paper corrector

Your best chance for an A+ essay. Try our free essay checker below.

Start typing, paste, or use

Get more suggestions to enhance this text and all your future writing

Your suggestions will show once you've entered some text.

Great job! We didn't find any suggestions in your text.

Why should you use a free essay checker?

The simple answer? Good grammar is necessary, but it's not easy. You've already done countless hours of research to write the essay. You don't want to spend countless hours correcting it too.

You'll get a better grade

Good grammar, or its absence, can determine if you get a good grade or a failing one. Impress your lecturer not just with how grammatically sound your writing is but how clear it is and how it flows.

You'll save time

Essay writing can be a long and tedious process. ProWritingAid's essay checker saves you the hassle by acting as the first line of defense against pesky grammar issues.

You'll become a better writer

Essay writing is a particular skill and one that becomes better with practice. Every time you run your essay through ProWritingAid's essay corrector, you get to see what your common mistakes are and how to fix them.

Good Writing = Good Grades

It's already hard to know what to write in an essay. Don't let grammar mistakes hinder your writing and prevent you from getting a good grade. ProWritingAid's essay checker will help you write your best essay yet. Since the checker is powered by AI, using it means that grammar errors don't stand a chance. Give your professors something to look forward to reading with clear, concise, and professional writing.

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How does ProWritingAid's essay checker work?

Your goal in essay writing is to convey your message as best as possible. ProWritingAid's essay checker is the first step toward doing this.

Get rid of spelling errors

ProWritingAid's essay checker will show you what it thinks are spelling errors and present you with possible corrections. If a word is flagged and it's actually spelled correctly, you can always choose to ignore the suggestion.

Fix grammar errors

Professors aren't fans of poor grammar because it interrupts your message and makes your essay hard to understand. ProWritingAid will run a grammar check on your paper to ensure that your message is precise and is being communicated the way you intended.

Get rid of punctuation mistakes

A missing period or comma here and there may not seem that serious, but you'll lose marks for punctuation errors. Run ProWritingAid's essay checker to use the correct punctuation marks every time and elevate your writing.

Improve readability

Make sure that in the grand scheme, your language is not too complicated. The essay checker's built-in Readability report will show if your essay is easy or hard to read. It specifically zones in on paragraphs that might be difficult to read so you can review them.

What else can the essay checker do?

The editing tool analyzes your text and highlights a variety of key writing issues, such as overused words, incohesive sentence structures, punctuation issues, repeated phrases, and inconsistencies.

You don't need to drown your essay in words just to meet the word count. ProWritingAid's essay checker will help to make your words more effective. You'll get to construct your arguments and make sure that every word you use builds toward a meaningful conclusion.

Transition words help organize your ideas by showing the relationship between them. The essay checker has a built-in Transition report that highlights and shows the percentage of transitions used in your essay. Use the results to add transitions where necessary.

An engaging essay has sentences of varying lengths. Don't bore your professor with long, rambling sentences. The essay checker will show you where you need to break long sentences into shorter sentences or add more sentence length variation.

Generally, in scholarly writing, with its emphasis on precision and clarity, the active voice is preferred. However, the passive voice is acceptable in some instances. When you run your essay through ProWritingAid's essay checker, you get feedback on whether you're using the passive or active voice to convey your idea.

There are specific academic power verbs, like appraise , investigate , debunk , support , etc., that can add more impact to your argument by giving a more positive and confident tone. The essay checker will check your writing for power verbs and notify you if you have less than three throughout your essay.

It's easy to get attached to certain phrases and use them as crutches in your essays, but this gives the impression of boring and repetitive writing. The essay checker will highlight your repeats and suggest contextually relevant alternatives.

Gain access to in-house blog reports on citations, how to write a thesis statement, how to write a conclusion, and more. Venture into a world of resources specific to your academic needs.

What kinds of papers does ProWritingAid correct?

No matter what you're writing, ProWritingAid will adapt and show you where your edits are needed most.

  • Argumentative
  • Descriptive
  • Textual analysis
  • Lab reports
  • Case studies
  • Literature reviews
  • Presentations
  • Dissertations
  • Research papers

Professors and students love using ProWritingAid

If you're an English teacher, you need to take a look at this tool - it reinforces what you're teaching, highlights strengths and weaknesses, and makes it easier to personalize instruction.

prowritingaid customer

Jennifer Gonzales

Only reason I managed to get an A in all my freshman composition classes.

ProWritingAid customer

Chris Layton

Great tool for academic work. Easy to use, and the reports and summary evaluation of your documents in several categories is very useful. So much more than spelling and grammar!

prowritingaid customer

Debra Callender

Questions & Answers

1. how do i use the essay checker online tool.

You can either copy and paste your essay in the essay checker field or upload your essay from your computer. Your suggestions will show once you enter text. You'll see a number of possible grammar and spelling issues. Sign up for free to get unlimited suggestions to improve your writing style, grammar, and sentence structure. Avoid unintentional plagiarism with a premium account.

2. Does the essay checker work with British English and American English?

The essay checker works with both British English and American English. Just choose the one you would like to use and your corrections will reflect this.

3. Is using an essay checker cheating?

No. The essay checker won't ever write the essay for you. It will point out possible edits and advise you on changes you need to make. You have full autonomy and get to decide which changes to accept.

4. Will the essay checker autocorrect my work?

The essay writing power remains in your hands. You choose which suggestions you want to accept, and you can ignore those that you don't think apply.

5. Is there a student discount?

Students who have an eligible student email address can get 20% off ProWritingAid Premium. You can apply for a student discount through Student App Centre .

6. Does ProWritingAid have a plagiarism checker?

Yes. ProWritingAid's plagiarism checker will check your work against over a billion webpages, published works, and academic papers, so you can be sure of its originality. Find out more about pricing for plagiarism checks here .

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Step into the future of the academic writing with Yomu

Never get stuck at writing your essay

Use an intelligent Document Assistant to help write entire sections and give you feedback.

Your personal essay copilot

Elevate your essay writing with an AI autocomplete that completes your sentences and paragraphs.

Edit your paper like a pro

Leverage AI to brainstorm and refine your paper: paraphrase, expand, shorten, summarize, and transform bullet points into detailed text.

Cite papers with ease

Easily find, include, and format citations in your paper with our AI-powered citation tool powered by Sourcely .

Ensure your work is original and uphold academic integrity.

Evaluate your work with an advanced plagiarism checker and gain insights on how to maintain originality and authenticity ( Ethics Statement ).

Yomu is loved by the users

Power your academic writing with yomu ai.

Save time writing your next essay or research paper with Yomu

Still thinking? There's even more

Authentic, original, genuine.

Get ahead of AI detectors and ensure your work is original and authentic.

Powerful AI commands

Edit, brainstorm, and write with our powerful AI commands.

Yomu lets you easily add, caption and reference figures in the text.

Grammar & text improvements

Write flawlessly with the help of our grammar & text improvement checker.

Yomu lets you easily create, modify, caption and reference tables in the text.

Submit desired features

We are not stopping here, review our roadmap.

2024
More humanized AIIntegrate grammar correction and text improvement tools
Chat with documentsYour personal library of sources and references
Always listening to our users

Frequently asked questions

Yomu is an AI-powered writing assistant that helps you write better essays, papers, and academic writing. Simply start typing and Yomu will generate suggestions for you to use in your writing. You can also use Yomu to generate entire paragraphs or sections. Yomu also helps find citations, references, and sources for you to use in your writing. You can make sure that your writing is plagiarism-free by using Yomu's plagiarism checker.

Essay Checker

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Samples by word count, view recent free essays, adolescent development issue in popular press.

  • Subjects: Development , Psychology
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Afro-American Experience in Surrogate Suburbs by Michney

  • Subjects: History , Racism in USA

Mixed Methods Research on Crisis Communication

  • Subjects: Communications , Sociology

Cognitive Load and Educational Multimedia

  • Subjects: Education , Learning Specifics

Hamlet Is More Resilient Character Than King Oedipus

  • Subjects: Comparative Literature , Literature
  • Words: 1105

Promotional Strategies for Healthcare Marketing

  • Subjects: Business , Marketing

“Seated Couple”: A Dogon Art Piece Analysis

  • Subjects: Art , Sculpture

The Civil War and Reconstruction Phases

  • Subjects: American Civil War , History

The 1930s and 1940s for African Americans

  • Subjects: African American Studies , History

Changes and Related Feelings in Older Adults

Use of statistics in different areas of activity.

  • Subjects: Sciences , Statistics

Why Abortions Should Be Prohibited

  • Subjects: Human Rights , Sociology

Personal Challenges of Clinical Experience

  • Subjects: Health & Medicine , Nursing

The “This Is Fine” Dog Meme Analysis

How do craftsmanship challenges the fast fashion industry.

  • Subjects: Design , Fashion
  • Words: 3912

Asset Forfeiture as a Controversial Subject

  • Subjects: Judicial Process on Criminals , Law

Climate Change and Interdisciplinary Approach

  • Subjects: Climate Change , Environment

Children Economic Well-Being and Ethnicity Correlation

Entomologist women in american films over years.

  • Subjects: History , Women Studies
  • Words: 1294

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Write. Cite. Manage References.

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I've been using Essayist for years as for a while I only had an iPad as my main driver yet had to write papers for school and this was the only applicaiton that allowed me to do so on the iPad while not only maintaining all APA formatting requirements but making it even easier to cite articles with it's Google Scholar search function. I've also had a couple of times where i'd reach out to their customer support and they were prompt in responding with answers or even potential updates and timing. I highly recommend this app to every student at every level as I used it through my MBA and i'm now using it to complete a doctorate.

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Essayist is an app designed with simplicity in mind. The team behind this application has eliminated the burden of the “essay criteria.” In its stead, we have a clear and perfectly structured canvas on which to begin writing without distractions. Upon purchase - which is worth every penny, you're prompted to choose your citation of choice. Your paper format and structure are based on this selection. Adding a works cited or bibliography is as simple as pressing a button. The app allows for chapters of books/magazines/ journals, websites, films, etc., and the user-friendly OS will enable you to seamlessly integrate those references as in-text citations, all with the press of a button. This app is a flagship creation of a solution to a long-standing problem. A problem that can perhaps be phrased as, “How can I have all the formatting and citations already done for me so that I can focus on just writing”? Essayist does just that.

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Scribbr Citation Generator

Accurate APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard citations, verified by experts, trusted by millions

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Scribbr for Chrome: Your shortcut to citations

Cite any page or article with a single click right from your browser. The extension does the hard work for you by automatically grabbing the title, author(s), publication date, and everything else needed to whip up the perfect citation.

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📚 Source typesWebsites, books, articles
🔎 AutociteSearch by title, URL, DOI, or ISBN

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Inaccurate citations can cost you points on your assignments, so our seasoned citation experts have invested countless hours in perfecting Scribbr’s citation generator algorithms. We’re proud to be recommended by teachers and universities worldwide.

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Look up your source by its title, URL, ISBN, or DOI, and let Scribbr find and fill in all the relevant information automatically.

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Create separate reference lists for each of your assignments to stay organized. You can also group related lists into folders.

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Are you using a LaTex editor like Overleaf? If so, you can easily export your references in Bib(La)TeX format with a single click.

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Change the typeface used for your reference list to match the rest of your document. Options include Times New Roman, Arial, and Calibri.

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Scribbr’s Citation Generator is built using the same citation software (CSL) as Mendeley and Zotero, but with an added layer for improved accuracy.

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Describe or evaluate your sources in annotations, and Scribbr will generate a perfectly formatted annotated bibliography .

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  • Introduction
  • Finding sources

Evaluating sources

  • Integrating sources

Citing sources

Tools and resources, a quick guide to working with sources.

Working with sources is an important skill that you’ll need throughout your academic career.

It includes knowing how to find relevant sources, assessing their authority and credibility, and understanding how to integrate sources into your work with proper referencing.

This quick guide will help you get started!

Finding relevant sources

Sources commonly used in academic writing include academic journals, scholarly books, websites, newspapers, and encyclopedias. There are three main places to look for such sources:

  • Research databases: Databases can be general or subject-specific. To get started, check out this list of databases by academic discipline . Another good starting point is Google Scholar .
  • Your institution’s library: Use your library’s database to narrow down your search using keywords to find relevant articles, books, and newspapers matching your topic.
  • Other online resources: Consult popular online sources like websites, blogs, or Wikipedia to find background information. Be sure to carefully evaluate the credibility of those online sources.

When using academic databases or search engines, you can use Boolean operators to refine your results.

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Get started

In academic writing, your sources should be credible, up to date, and relevant to your research topic. Useful approaches to evaluating sources include the CRAAP test and lateral reading.

CRAAP is an abbreviation that reminds you of a set of questions to ask yourself when evaluating information.

  • Currency: Does the source reflect recent research?
  • Relevance: Is the source related to your research topic?
  • Authority: Is it a respected publication? Is the author an expert in their field?
  • Accuracy: Does the source support its arguments and conclusions with evidence?
  • Purpose: What is the author’s intention?

Lateral reading

Lateral reading means comparing your source to other sources. This allows you to:

  • Verify evidence
  • Contextualize information
  • Find potential weaknesses

If a source is using methods or drawing conclusions that are incompatible with other research in its field, it may not be reliable.

Integrating sources into your work

Once you have found information that you want to include in your paper, signal phrases can help you to introduce it. Here are a few examples:

FunctionExample sentenceSignal words and phrases
You present the author’s position neutrally, without any special emphasis. recent research, food services are responsible for one-third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.According to, analyzes, asks, describes, discusses, explains, in the words of, notes, observes, points out, reports, writes
A position is taken in agreement with what came before.Recent research Einstein’s theory of general relativity by observing light from behind a black hole.Agrees, confirms, endorses, reinforces, promotes, supports
A position is taken for or against something, with the implication that the debate is ongoing.Allen Ginsberg artistic revision …Argues, contends, denies, insists, maintains

Following the signal phrase, you can choose to quote, paraphrase or summarize the source.

  • Quoting : This means including the exact words of another source in your paper. The quoted text must be enclosed in quotation marks or (for longer quotes) presented as a block quote . Quote a source when the meaning is difficult to convey in different words or when you want to analyze the language itself.
  • Paraphrasing : This means putting another person’s ideas into your own words. It allows you to integrate sources more smoothly into your text, maintaining a consistent voice. It also shows that you have understood the meaning of the source.
  • Summarizing : This means giving an overview of the essential points of a source. Summaries should be much shorter than the original text. You should describe the key points in your own words and not quote from the original text.

Whenever you quote, paraphrase, or summarize a source, you must include a citation crediting the original author.

Citing your sources is important because it:

  • Allows you to avoid plagiarism
  • Establishes the credentials of your sources
  • Backs up your arguments with evidence
  • Allows your reader to verify the legitimacy of your conclusions

The most common citation styles are APA, MLA, and Chicago style. Each citation style has specific rules for formatting citations.

Generate APA, MLA, Chicago,  and Harvard citations in seconds

Scribbr offers tons of tools and resources to make working with sources easier and faster. Take a look at our top picks:

  • Citation Generator: Automatically generate accurate references and in-text citations using Scribbr’s APA Citation Generator, MLA Citation Generator , Harvard Referencing Generator , and Chicago Citation Generator .
  • Plagiarism Checker : Detect plagiarism in your paper using the most accurate Turnitin-powered plagiarism software available to students.
  • AI Proofreader: Upload and improve unlimited documents and earn higher grades on your assignments. Try it for free!
  • Paraphrasing tool: Avoid accidental plagiarism and make your text sound better.
  • Grammar checker : Eliminate pesky spelling and grammar mistakes.
  • Summarizer: Read more in less time. Distill lengthy and complex texts down to their key points.
  • AI detector: Find out if your text was written with ChatGPT or any other AI writing tool. ChatGPT 2 & ChatGPT 3 supported.
  • Proofreading services : Have a human editor improve your writing.
  • Citation checker: Check your work for citation errors and missing citations.
  • Knowledge Base : Explore hundreds of articles, bite-sized videos, time-saving templates, and handy checklists that guide you through the process of research, writing, and citation.

Wyzant

What makes for an outstanding college essay?

3 answers by expert tutors.

essay finder app

Jessica C. answered • 18h

Achieve Your Study, Writing, & Test Prep Goals with a Pro Tutor

Admissions officers read hundreds of applications trying to discern which students will achieve the most during their college experience.

The personal statement is a main factor in the admission decision, especially when so many students look exactly the same on paper.

Grades, test scores, volunteer experience, internships, these variables don't provide a lot of variation. The personal essay is an opportunity for students to present who they are and impress upon the admissions committee why they should be accepted to a particular institution. 

Trying to write about yourself can be difficult. Knowing what details and facts about your life to include and what to leave out, how much time to spend talking about one thing or several, there's a lot to consider when writing your personal statement.

Start with an image.

Great application essays are cinematic; they have a heavy visual component that lets the reader imagine themselves in the student's story. Compare these two openings:

  • "My parents always told me to do my best."
  • "The bicycle wheel was still turning, though half of the bike was under a bush. My dad pulled the bike from the bush, wiped dirt from my knee, and set me back on the seat. 'You've got to get back on the horse,' he said. Though I had no idea what he meant then, this has become my guiding phrase in life."

The second is more personal, engaging, and tells a unique story.

Include an Epiphany

An epiphany is your "aha" moment. That moment when you realized something significant, something that changed the way you think or act.

Attaching an epiphany to your vivid memory will tell the admissions officers what they really need to know about you: that you learn from experience, and that you know how to skillfully articulate what you've learned.

Think about it. The personal essay is an opportunity for the college to see what kind of student you will be. They're hoping to rope in a freshman (or transfer) student that will thrive in their academic environment. Demonstrating how you learned an important quality is much more effective than simply stating your qualifications.

For example:

When I saw my baby brother in my mom's arms for the first time I realized I was no longer the most important person to my mom and dad. But when I looked at my brother's rumpled red face, I felt that realization wash out of me. It didn't matter that I wasn't the main focus of the family. We were all a family together, each piece as precious as the next.

The body of your essay should include particular life and school experiences relevant to your epiphany value. If your epiphany stressed community , choose extracurriculars and volunteer work that relate to the value of community. You want to present a cohesive, clear picture of yourself, and you can get scattered if you talk about too many disparate achievements.

End with an Image & Epiphany

Many short story writers end with an image that shows the reader the conclusion rather than telling them, which can seem heavy-handed.

Images are powerful. They're open to interpretation. They can show more than you can tell.

If you can end with a strong image that again shows your value, you're ending strong. The last sentence is your last word on the matter; rarely will your application essay be read more than once. You want the reader to finish your application with the thought, "Yes! We have to have them!" 

If you kept your essay hugging your core value, it will be easy to reuse your initial image.

For example, I was working with a student who was writing his application essay about his family's business success and his own drive to study business in college.

His opening image was his father's busy restaurant. This was the moment the student realized that his father built his restaurant from scratch -- all the more impressive because he was the first of his family to immigrate to the US from Thailand.

To close, my student went back to his original image of that busy restaurant, that moment when he realized his father built his own success from the ground up and related it to his own experience which he'd shared in the previous paragraphs.

His examples showed him to be an independent, entrepreneurial, enterprising person.

His final image was him cleaning up after all the customers had left the restaurant. He realized that with success comes the behind-the-scenes action of cleaning up, keeping the mechanics running smoothly.

It was another important lesson for him. Success isn't divorced from hard work. A perfect image and understanding to close the essay with.

essay finder app

Esther B. answered • 1d

Writing Tutor. Graduated with high distinction in English Literature.

Several steps contribute to excellence in college-level essay writing.

1. Identify the question you are trying to answer. Every college-level essay should have a critical question they are trying to answer or at the very least grapple with. Typically, professors will provide a prompt or prompts to choose from. If not, think about what you are trying to prove or argue in your essay.

2. Develop a thesis. A thesis should be a statement, or a pair of statements, explaining the crux of your argument and outlining how you're answering the prompt. A thesis should lay out the analytical components of your argument concisely, while still doing justice to the complexity of the analysis.

3. Select several pieces of evidence from the text and develop a close reading that strengthens your thesis. An exceptionally strong essay also incorporates second-hand sources such as academic articles.

4. Select evidence that contradicts your thesis and argue against it. The ability to identify and explain contradictory evidence/arguments, while displaying your analytical argument's superiority, is a trademark of an outstanding college-level essay.

5. Properly craft a conclusion. It's important to have a paragraph or two that wraps everything up. At a minimum, restate your thesis and evidence. It is optional -- but highly encouraged -- to relate your argument and findings to a larger idea or to current events.

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Alison R. answered • 1d

Creative Nonfiction Writing Program at Top 10 Northwestern University

The Common App essay, also known as the personal essay, is a 650-word required application essay for almost every college in the United States. The Common App provides seven prompts for students to choose from, ranging from questions about a student's identity or background to asking students to describe a time when they were grateful for someone or something.

Here are five tips for nailing this essay, no matter which prompt you choose:

  • Tell a story. The best way to engage a reader is with a story. You should start your essay by dropping the reader into a specific moment in your life. Describe how you felt in this moment, what the sky looked like, how the room smelled, what kind of chair you were sitting on. Not only do these details help the reader see through your eyes, but also, the specificities help your essay stand out from the rest. Or course, this story should be relevant to the overall topic/theme of your essay.
  • Which brings me to number two: develop a thesis statement for your essay. This trick will help you be sure that throughout your entire essay, you're sticking to one main point. Whether your essay is about the time when you traveled to Japan to meet your grandmother, or how you learned to adapt as a student after your learning disability diagnosis, the thesis should summarize the lesson you learned.
  • Your essay should show growth. Remember, this is an application essay for college, so readers love to see that you've learned something, and better yet, that you can articulate what you've learned in the form of an essay. One simple way to show character growth (you are the character!) is to structure your essay with a "before," a "turning point," and an "after." In the "after" section, there's room to talk about the lessons you learned from this event, accomplishment, or realization in your life.
  • This should be obvious, but do not use AI to write your essay. College admissions boards use their own artificial intelligence tools to detect essays that have been written using AI. Don't risk it.
  • Use the essay as an opportunity to share your voice, values, and character. It's the only part of your application where you can show readers who you truly are. There's no need to write formally. A conversational tone is often the best way for readers to really get to know you.

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Can AI Help a Student Get Into Stanford or Yale?

Two entrepreneurial Stanford students fed hundreds of essays—both high and low quality—into an AI model to train it on what top-tier colleges look for in admissions essays.  

By  Lauren Coffey

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Two Stanford students have created an AI-focused company that helps students with their college admissions essays.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Getty Images | Rawpixel

Scott Lee was scrolling through LinkedIn in June when he came across a post touting exactly what he was looking for: an AI machine called Esslo that provides feedback on college essays, based on those that have helped students gain admission to top-tier universities like Harvard and Stanford.

Lee, a student at Sacramento City College looking to transfer to the University of California system, had been using ChatGPT to review his admissions essays in the absence of friends and mentors on campus during summer break. But while ChatGPT “said what you wanted to hear” and failed to provide concrete fixes, Lee said Esslo met his drafts with “brutal honesty.” His essay had a “strong opening,” it told him, but didn’t capitalize on its full potential. And while his extracurricular activities were impressive, he hadn’t delved into the personal growth he gained from them or the challenges he faced.

“That is something I can implement, versus ChatGPT, which is very broad,” Lee said. He said he used Esslo “mainly for my early drafts, where it gave a lot more feedback so I’m not handing off something super underdeveloped to my friends and mentors,” who will help with the final version.

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Lee is among hundreds of students trying out Esslo—whose name is a mashup of the words “essay” and “Elo,” a ranking system used in chess and esports. The program is the brainchild of two Stanford University students looking to tackle what they believe is one of the most stressful parts of college applications: the admissions essay. 

How It Works 

When budding entrepreneurs Hadassah Betapudi and Elijah Kim began looking for a potential start-up project in the education-technology world, they started by asking friends and peers about some of the biggest gripes they had when it came to applying to colleges.

The normal topics cropped up—the steps involved in the application process, for one, and finding time to tackle the tasks involved. But the Stanford students soon realized the crux of the issue wasn’t about finding time: It was the daunting task of creating a good-enough essay to gain entry into top-tier schools.

“What we heard super consistently with college applications was that students had never written an essay like that before,” Kim said. “It was big and intimidating and it sets the trajectory for the rest of your life, so we heard a lot of stress over that—and we thought we could build something to help.”

Kim, now a graduate student at Stanford studying machine learning, compiled a data set of essays from students who’d gained admission to top-tier universities, including Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, and trained artificial intelligence models on those roughly 500 essays. He also included essays that were cited as “bad” examples from various college websites and admissions consultants.

Any student can now plug in their own essay, which brings up a list of suggestions such as avoiding clichés, using imagery effectively or getting more granular with details. Esslo also gives a score for writing, detail, voice and character. There is a free version and a paid version—the former of which gives students a round of line-by-line edits for one draft, the latter of which gives unlimited line-by-line edits. For every paid version Esslo sells, the creators promise that a student at a Title I–designated high school—which typically has fewer resources—will receive the paid version for free.

Both Kim and Betapudi were quick to say the technology will not write an essay for a student, or even serve as a brainstorming tool. But they think it can help fine-tune an essay—providing feedback that’s similar to the advice you might get from a parent, college counselor or paid college consultant.

“We want to train students to be better writers and train them on what colleges are looking for, versus doing it for them,” Kim said. “It’s no different than showing it to an English teacher and asking for feedback.”

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Another Admissions Counselor?

Rick Clark, executive director of enrollment management at the Georgia Institute of Technology, sees AI as the equivalent of using an admissions consultant—except that it’s more affordable for those who cannot pay for the often-pricey consultants.

“Using ChatGPT and copy and pasting it will create a horrible essay because it’s not specific and detailed, but using [this] to get feedback? In that regard, I’m all for it,” Clark said. “It’s democratizing resources, advice and consults, and it’s available 24-7, where sometimes adults are sleeping or working a second job.”

Few universities have policies on using technology for admissions essays. Most of those that address AI at all issue a blanket statement banning the use of the technology in the admissions process entirely.

David Hawkins, the chief education and policy officer for the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said NACAC has steered clear of creating any policy on supplementary generative AI use thus far, as the organization is still in the “information-gathering stage.” He echoed Clark’s notion that it could be seen as similar to using admissions consultants but added that the “most important human” intervention comes from the students themselves.

“They have an authentic story to tell, and the authenticity is what admissions officers are looking for,” he said. “Whether an institution allows AI or whether they don’t—both are looking for some expression of authenticity in essays. It certainly is still down to the student as to the quality and the depth of what they submit.”

Arnold Langat, a senior at Stanford applying for medical school, said he was encouraged by Esslo to replace “a few clichéd phrases with more personal reflections to better showcase my unique perspective.” Faced with writing more than 50 unique essays, he used ChatGPT for brainstorming and, similarly to Lee, used Esslo to fine-tune a first draft before passing it along to mentors, friends and family for further review.

Kim and Betapudi say they hope Esslo will close some socioeconomic gaps.

“Any student with an internet connection can find a standard high school or college prep course, but there’s still a huge gap in terms of access to quality guidance,” Kim said. “And we feel technology has caught up to where we can meaningfully close that gap.”

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Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

In 1953, Roald Dahl published “ The Great Automatic Grammatizator ,” a short story about an electrical engineer who secretly desires to be a writer. One day, after completing construction of the world’s fastest calculating machine, the engineer realizes that “English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness.” He constructs a fiction-writing machine that can produce a five-thousand-word short story in thirty seconds; a novel takes fifteen minutes and requires the operator to manipulate handles and foot pedals, as if he were driving a car or playing an organ, to regulate the levels of humor and pathos. The resulting novels are so popular that, within a year, half the fiction published in English is a product of the engineer’s invention.

Is there anything about art that makes us think it can’t be created by pushing a button, as in Dahl’s imagination? Right now, the fiction generated by large language models like ChatGPT is terrible, but one can imagine that such programs might improve in the future. How good could they get? Could they get better than humans at writing fiction—or making paintings or movies—in the same way that calculators are better at addition and subtraction?

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.

I think the same underlying principle applies to visual art, although it’s harder to quantify the choices that a painter might make. Real paintings bear the mark of an enormous number of decisions. By comparison, a person using a text-to-image program like DALL-E enters a prompt such as “A knight in a suit of armor fights a fire-breathing dragon,” and lets the program do the rest. (The newest version of DALL-E accepts prompts of up to four thousand characters—hundreds of words, but not enough to describe every detail of a scene.) Most of the choices in the resulting image have to be borrowed from similar paintings found online; the image might be exquisitely rendered, but the person entering the prompt can’t claim credit for that.

Some commentators imagine that image generators will affect visual culture as much as the advent of photography once did. Although this might seem superficially plausible, the idea that photography is similar to generative A.I. deserves closer examination. When photography was first developed, I suspect it didn’t seem like an artistic medium because it wasn’t apparent that there were a lot of choices to be made; you just set up the camera and start the exposure. But over time people realized that there were a vast number of things you could do with cameras, and the artistry lies in the many choices that a photographer makes. It might not always be easy to articulate what the choices are, but when you compare an amateur’s photos to a professional’s, you can see the difference. So then the question becomes: Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no. An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.

We can imagine a text-to-image generator that, over the course of many sessions, lets you enter tens of thousands of words into its text box to enable extremely fine-grained control over the image you’re producing; this would be something analogous to Photoshop with a purely textual interface. I’d say that a person could use such a program and still deserve to be called an artist. The film director Bennett Miller has used DALL-E 2 to generate some very striking images that have been exhibited at the Gagosian gallery; to create them, he crafted detailed text prompts and then instructed DALL-E to revise and manipulate the generated images again and again. He generated more than a hundred thousand images to arrive at the twenty images in the exhibit. But he has said that he hasn’t been able to obtain comparable results on later releases of DALL-E . I suspect this might be because Miller was using DALL-E for something it’s not intended to do; it’s as if he hacked Microsoft Paint to make it behave like Photoshop, but as soon as a new version of Paint was released, his hacks stopped working. OpenAI probably isn’t trying to build a product to serve users like Miller, because a product that requires a user to work for months to create an image isn’t appealing to a wide audience. The company wants to offer a product that generates images with little effort.

It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like. Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.

Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium. I contend that this is true even if one’s goal is to create entertainment rather than high art. People often underestimate the effort required to entertain; a thriller novel may not live up to Kafka’s ideal of a book—an “axe for the frozen sea within us”—but it can still be as finely crafted as a Swiss watch. And an effective thriller is more than its premise or its plot. I doubt you could replace every sentence in a thriller with one that is semantically equivalent and have the resulting novel be as entertaining. This means that its sentences—and the small-scale choices they represent—help to determine the thriller’s effectiveness.

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.

Of course, most pieces of writing, whether articles or reports or e-mails, do not come with the expectation that they embody thousands of choices. In such cases, is there any harm in automating the task? Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.

Recently, Google aired a commercial during the Paris Olympics for Gemini, its competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4 . The ad shows a father using Gemini to compose a fan letter, which his daughter will send to an Olympic athlete who inspires her. Google pulled the commercial after widespread backlash from viewers; a media professor called it “one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen.” It’s notable that people reacted this way, even though artistic creativity wasn’t the attribute being supplanted. No one expects a child’s fan letter to an athlete to be extraordinary; if the young girl had written the letter herself, it would likely have been indistinguishable from countless others. The significance of a child’s fan letter—both to the child who writes it and to the athlete who receives it—comes from its being heartfelt rather than from its being eloquent.

Many of us have sent store-bought greeting cards, knowing that it will be clear to the recipient that we didn’t compose the words ourselves. We don’t copy the words from a Hallmark card in our own handwriting, because that would feel dishonest. The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.

Some have claimed that large language models are not laundering the texts they’re trained on but, rather, learning from them, in the same way that human writers learn from the books they’ve read. But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate. Your phone’s auto-complete may offer good suggestions or bad ones, but in neither case is it trying to say anything to you or the person you’re texting. The fact that ChatGPT can generate coherent sentences invites us to imagine that it understands language in a way that your phone’s auto-complete does not, but it has no more intention to communicate.

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

Because language comes so easily to us, it’s easy to forget that it lies on top of these other experiences of subjective feeling and of wanting to communicate that feeling. We’re tempted to project those experiences onto a large language model when it emits coherent sentences, but to do so is to fall prey to mimicry; it’s the same phenomenon as when butterflies evolve large dark spots on their wings that can fool birds into thinking they’re predators with big eyes. There is a context in which the dark spots are sufficient; birds are less likely to eat a butterfly that has them, and the butterfly doesn’t really care why it’s not being eaten, as long as it gets to live. But there is a big difference between a butterfly and a predator that poses a threat to a bird.

A person using generative A.I. to help them write might claim that they are drawing inspiration from the texts the model was trained on, but I would again argue that this differs from what we usually mean when we say one writer draws inspiration from another. Consider a college student who turns in a paper that consists solely of a five-page quotation from a book, stating that this quotation conveys exactly what she wanted to say, better than she could say it herself. Even if the student is completely candid with the instructor about what she’s done, it’s not accurate to say that she is drawing inspiration from the book she’s citing. The fact that a large language model can reword the quotation enough that the source is unidentifiable doesn’t change the fundamental nature of what’s going on.

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist. Such writing might support other goals, such as attracting views for advertising or satisfying bureaucratic requirements. When people are required to produce such text, we can hardly blame them for using whatever tools are available to accelerate the process. But is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them? It would be unrealistic to claim that if we refuse to use large language models, then the requirements to create low-quality text will disappear. However, I think it is inevitable that the more we use large language models to fulfill those requirements, the greater those requirements will eventually become. We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

It’s not impossible that one day we will have computer programs that can do anything a human being can do, but, contrary to the claims of the companies promoting A.I., that is not something we’ll see in the next few years. Even in domains that have absolutely nothing to do with creativity, current A.I. programs have profound limitations that give us legitimate reasons to question whether they deserve to be called intelligent at all.

The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills. I think this reflects our intuitions about human beings pretty well. Most people can learn a new skill given sufficient practice, but the faster the person picks up the skill, the more intelligent we think the person is. What’s interesting about this definition is that—unlike I.Q. tests—it’s also applicable to nonhuman entities; when a dog learns a new trick quickly, we consider that a sign of intelligence.

In 2019, researchers conducted an experiment in which they taught rats how to drive. They put the rats in little plastic containers with three copper-wire bars; when the mice put their paws on one of these bars, the container would either go forward, or turn left or turn right. The rats could see a plate of food on the other side of the room and tried to get their vehicles to go toward it. The researchers trained the rats for five minutes at a time, and after twenty-four practice sessions, the rats had become proficient at driving. Twenty-four trials were enough to master a task that no rat had likely ever encountered before in the evolutionary history of the species. I think that’s a good demonstration of intelligence.

Now consider the current A.I. programs that are widely acclaimed for their performance. AlphaZero, a program developed by Google’s DeepMind, plays chess better than any human player, but during its training it played forty-four million games, far more than any human can play in a lifetime. For it to master a new game, it will have to undergo a similarly enormous amount of training. By Chollet’s definition, programs like AlphaZero are highly skilled, but they aren’t particularly intelligent, because they aren’t efficient at gaining new skills. It is currently impossible to write a computer program capable of learning even a simple task in only twenty-four trials, if the programmer is not given information about the task beforehand.

Self-driving cars trained on millions of miles of driving can still crash into an overturned trailer truck, because such things are not commonly found in their training data, whereas humans taking their first driving class will know to stop. More than our ability to solve algebraic equations, our ability to cope with unfamiliar situations is a fundamental part of why we consider humans intelligent. Computers will not be able to replace humans until they acquire that type of competence, and that is still a long way off; for the time being, we’re just looking for jobs that can be done with turbocharged auto-complete.

Despite years of hype, the ability of generative A.I. to dramatically increase economic productivity remains theoretical. (Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs released a report titled “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

Some individuals have defended large language models by saying that most of what human beings say or write isn’t particularly original. That is true, but it’s also irrelevant. When someone says “I’m sorry” to you, it doesn’t matter that other people have said sorry in the past; it doesn’t matter that “I’m sorry” is a string of text that is statistically unremarkable. If someone is being sincere, their apology is valuable and meaningful, even though apologies have previously been uttered. Likewise, when you tell someone that you’re happy to see them, you are saying something meaningful, even if it lacks novelty.

Something similar holds true for art. Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. ♦

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    The editing tool analyzes your text and highlights a variety of key writing issues, such as overused words, incohesive sentence structures, punctuation issues, repeated phrases, and inconsistencies. Eliminate unnecessary words. Improve transitions. Improve your sentence structure. Passive voice checker. Add power verbs.

  9. Free Essay Checker

    Check Your Essay for Free. Turn in work that makes the grade. Grammarly's free essay-checking tool reviews your papers for grammatical mistakes, unclear sentences, and misused words. Step 1: Add your text, and Grammarly will underline any issues. Step 2: Hover over the underlines to see suggestions. Step 3: Click a suggestion to accept it ...

  10. Yomu AI

    Yomu is an AI-powered writing assistant that helps you write better essays, papers, and academic writing. Simply start typing and Yomu will generate suggestions for you to use in your writing. You can also use Yomu to generate entire paragraphs or sections. Yomu also helps find citations, references, and sources for you to use in your writing.

  11. Grammarly: Free AI Writing Assistance

    An animation of Grammarly's product shows an example of Grammarly amending email text in order to strengthen the call to action for business customers. An animation shows 10 logos of products where Grammarly works, with a cursor clicking on Slack, Outlook, and Notion, and a text box displaying relevant Grammarly prompts for each application ...

  12. RefSeek

    Academic search engine for students and researchers. Locates relevant academic search results from web pages, books, encyclopedias, and journals.

  13. Free Online Paper & Essay Checker

    The Ginger Essay Checker helps you write better papers instantly. Upload as much text as you want - even entire documents - and Essay Checker will automatically correct any spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, and misused words. Ginger Essay Checker uses patent-pending technology to fix essays, improving your writing just like a human ...

  14. Essay

    Essay helps you move beyond the fear of the blank page so you can finally put your ideas down on paper. Then, it helps you move them around and change them, word by word, sentence by sentence, and paragraph by paragraph, rejecting what doesn't work and keeping what's great. In the end, what you're left with is your incredible ideas, powerfully ...

  15. Original Writing, Made Easy

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  16. Essaybot: Free Essay Writing Tool

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  17. ≡ IvyPanda

    If you're reading this, you've already arrived at the perfect place! At IvyPanda, we pride ourselves on compiling one of the largest databases of free essay samples. It's big enough to cover most academic subjects and topics, and you can filter your search to find precisely what you need. There are plenty of paper types to choose from ...

  18. Essayist

    Essayist is an app designed with simplicity in mind. The team behind this application has eliminated the burden of the "essay criteria." In its stead, we have a clear and perfectly structured canvas on which to begin writing without distractions. Upon purchase - which is worth every penny, you're prompted to choose your citation of choice.

  19. Writing guide

    This guide is designed to teach you to write and edit an essay, or another argumentative piece, from start to finish. It will help you align your motivations with the work and to choose a topic that grips you. This page will take you on a journey designed to convince you that writing an essay is a worthwhile endeavour, and to guide you through ...

  20. Free Citation Generator

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  21. What makes for an outstanding college essay?

    The Common App essay, also known as the personal essay, is a 650-word required application essay for almost every college in the United States. The Common App provides seven prompts for students to choose from, ranging from questions about a student's identity or background to asking students to describe a time when they were grateful for ...

  22. Stanford students train AI to help with college essays

    The normal topics cropped up—the steps involved in the application process, for one, and finding time to tackle the tasks involved. But the Stanford students soon realized the crux of the issue wasn't about finding time: It was the daunting task of creating a good-enough essay to gain entry into top-tier schools.

  23. Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art

    It's harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order ...

  24. ‎Filtrate App on the App Store

    ‎Discover Filtrate, the ultimate tool for finding and organizing movies, TV shows, and songs. Create tailored lists through our unique filtered search, narrowing down media by specific categories like "cake" and "family." Perfect for students seeking essay material, families planning movie nights, or…

  25. Murder Hornets and Writing a College Application Essay

    Carlos Avila Gonzalez | The San Francisco Chronicle | Getty Images. A student works on college application essays with her father, in San Mateo, Calif., in 2020.