Your Mac Can Help You Write a College Paper

If writing isn’t your preferred form of pastime or a full-time career, the chances are you hate it. However, if you want to thrive (or at least survive) as a student, you should learn how to cope with paper writing. You’ll have to weather the storms of lonely, solitary writing sessions long enough to enjoy a meaningful academic pay-off. Fortunately, there are scads of Mac apps that can make the arduous task easier. Use the following step-by-step guide on how to get paper writing help from your Mac.

Organize Your Thoughts

You don’t have to drown in the heap of sticky notes to collect your thoughts for writing. There are neat utilities such as Evernote and NoteSuite that will help you group key information into clearly-defined categories without messing up your room or killing trees. After the extensive notes are prepared, you can move further by creating elaborate mind maps to sketch out your ideas. The visual representation of relevant information will allow you to better understand how it connects to the central concept, thereby considerably expanding your cognitive capacity. MindNode Pro is a simple way to build intuitive frameworks on your Mac. Make sure to check it out.

Another approach to organizing your thoughts for a paper is to make a rough outline. You can do it by listing topic sentences for each paragraph, thereby ensuring that they serve a specific purpose in your written assignment. Outlining will help you avoid repetitive ideas and sections, which is why you should never neglect this step of paper writing. App Store is home to dozens of apps that can be used for outlining. You can start by installing OmniOutliner which is a solid utility for both students and professional writers.

Write Without Distractions

The key to producing a great college paper is to eliminate unnecessary distractions during the writing process. The use of a word processor overburdened with fancy features, buttons, and menus can be extremely costly in terms of productivity. Those bells and whistles demand your attention and drain your cognitive energies. For this reason, you should opt for no-fuss apps that have recently gained tremendous popularity on App Store. Good utilities to consider are Byword, OmmWriter Dana II, and iA Writer. Their full-screen view will let you concentrate on your musings rather than on superfluous design elements. Surely, those apps are not the best possible choice when it comes to editing; however, you can always do it using more suitable apps when the first draft is done.

Manage Your Time

You won’t get far without solid time management skills. Luckily, Mac and its panoply of apps will provide you with much-needed paper writing help with regard to time management. Use a free SelfControl utility to carve out distraction-free blocks of time for your writing sessions. The app will block your access to social media and other time-consuming websites, thereby increasing your focus.

Another important facet of productivity is task management. You don’t want to get sidetracked by unimportant tasks when you work on a large project. To ensure that you are focused on what really matters, download Wunderlist or Things. The apps allow you to create customized task lists, which will keep you organized. Mark off a task after the completion and proceed to another. The lists can be synced between Apple devices, thus providing you with additional flexibility. Furthermore, the task management apps feature reminders, which will benefit busy and overworked students.

Put Everything Together

The penultimate step is to put everything together. Once again, Mac is your best friend for paper writing help because it provides you with plenty of options for compiling your research and notes into something you can submit. The tried and tested apps such as Mellel, Scrivener, and StoryMill will make the drafting infinitely easier. The apps are designed with students in mind, which is why they don’t take much time to get used to. Ones you familiarize yourself with the available features, you’ll be able to quickly create professionally-looking and crisp papers. There’s also LyX, which is a nice formatting app. Even though the learning curve is rather steep, the app will save you plenty of time.

Edit Your Paper

The final phase in the paper writing process is editing. Without the help of a professional proofreader, it is not easy to spot mistakes and typos in your copy. Even if you put on your reading glasses and try to work through all the kinks in the paper, you’ll surely miss a couple of them. To ensure that careless mistakes don’t detract from the overall quality of your writing, use Ginger, Paper Rater, AutoCrit, or Grammarly. These apps and services offer comprehensive grammar, spelling, syntax, and punctuation checks that will take your paper to the next level. Choose one that suits you best and submit a squeaky-clean copy.

