3 Tools to Help You and Your Students Feel More Confident Writing

I often have students in art class they don’t feel comfortable writing.

I myself wasn’t always a big fan. As with most things in life, it takes practice and access to the proper tools. Two tools that I use myself and also share with my students are Grammarly and the Hemmingway Editor. Both of have free and paid for versions.

I tend to be a fast typer and a terrible editor, so discovering grammarly.com was like a dream come true. Seriously, it’s like having an English teacher looking over your shoulder reminding you to add commas and to stop using really over and over. Maybe you don’t love the idea of having an English teacher looking over you’re shoulder, but trust me, you’re going to love this. It saves you time, keeps you from losing points on your writing assignments, and makes you look just a little bit smarter. Now, Grammarly isn’t perfect, you still need to read over your work as well, but it’s a BIG HELP. Grammarly has a Chrome Extension, that will edit as you write papers, emails, or pretty much anything that you type.

The other tool that I love is the Hemmingway Editor.

Hemmingway was known for writing short and concise sentences. ( Have you heard of 6 word stories?) The Hemmingway Editor will help you with sentence structure and length.

My final writing tip is to explore talk to text.

Do you have students that STRUGGLE with writing? Maybe they can’t seem to get their thoughts down on paper in a coherent fashion. Maybe their handwriting is a disaster, or maybe they just broke the hand that they use to write. Using a speech to text tool is a great adaptation for all of the above. There are a lot of options out there so feel free to explore what works best for you and your students. Here’s one that I’m loving and some ways that I”m using it.