Online writing programs for students

Transmedia Writing Michigan State University via Coursera Do you have a desire to write a novel, write a screenplay, design a video game? In this project-centered course you will develop your own, original, intellectual property IP into a transmedia project containing written versions of your IP on various platforms.

You will begin your novel, adapt the first chapters of your novel into the opening scenes of a film or TV show and create a game design concept of your IP. How to Succeed at: Writing Applications The University of Sheffield via FutureLearn This free three week course will help you produce a perfect CV, application and online profile when applying for a job or course.

Academic and Business Writing University of California, Berkeley via edX An introduction to academic and business writing for English Language Learners, focusing on grammar, vocabulary, structure, editing, and publication. At the end of this course, you will be a more confident writer, able to create higher quality professional documents more quickly.

This course is at the introductory or beginner level and focuses on mastering the basics of email etiquette and communication.

English for Effective Business Writing The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology via Coursera This course aims to improve your Business English writing skills by developing your use of vocabulary, grammar, understanding of different business writing genres, and your ability to write professional business documents.

Business Writing University of Colorado Boulder via Coursera This course will teach you how to apply the top ten principles of good business writing to your work, how to deploy simple tools to dramatically improve your writing, and how to execute organization, structure, and revision to communicate more masterfully than ever.

Rhetoric: The Art of Persuasive Writing and Public Speaking Harvard University via edX Gain critical communication skills in writing and public speaking with this introduction to American political rhetoric. Learn how to articulate your thoughts in a clear and concise manner that will allow your ideas to be better understood by your readers.

Improve your business writing skill by learning to select and use appropriate formats for your audience, use the correct medium and adjust your writing style accordingly, as well as identify your objective and communicate it clearly. Grant Writing and Crowdfunding for Public Libraries University of Michigan via edX Learn how to increase your impact, innovate, and overcome often static funding through various fundraising and grant writing approaches.

Business Writing Techniques Doane University via edX Business Writing Techniques, will expand on the different communication styles and discuss the best practices of business writing by providing real-world scenarios and applications. Learners will also discuss the proper etiquette of business writing and examine the use of emoji in business communications. This course will provide the tools to help you do just that.

Join professional resume writer Greg Langstaff for a step-by-step guide with lots of examples to building a dynamite resume and making yourself into a top tier job search candidate. How to Write a Resume Project-Centered Course State University of New York via Coursera In this project-centered course, you will craft an essential cornerstone of the modern-day job or internship search: the resume. You will learn how to convert a boring resume into a dynamic asset statement that conveys your talents in the language that an employer understands.

Craft Your Cover Letter via Udacity Write a compelling narrative that showcases your value to the company. Refresh Your Resume Grow with Google via Udacity Create a targeted resume that gets the attention of recruiters and lands you an interview in tech. Academic Writing UGC via Swayam This course aims to fill this gap by providing the fundamental knowledge required for effective and result oriented academic writing.

It is a foundation course and the application of this knowledge completely depends on an individual learner and his or her area of research.

This MOOC will ease the pain — and make your writing shine. Writing your World: Finding yourself in the academic space University of Cape Town via Coursera In this course, we provide practical insights into how to write an academic essay.

We show you how to develop the academic skills needed to be a competent academic writer. Getting Started with Essay Writing University of California, Irvine via Coursera By introducing you to three types of academic essays, this course will especially help prepare you for work in college classes, but anyone who wants to improve his or her writing skills can benefit from this course. By the end of this course, you will be able to complete all the steps in planning a research paper.

An Intermediate Guide to Writing in English for University Study University of Reading via FutureLearn Improve your academic English skills further, learning about critical analysis, using sources, avoiding plagiarism and more. How to Write an Essay University of California, Berkeley via edX An introduction to academic writing for English Language Learners, focusing on essay development, grammatical correctness, and self-editing.

Advanced Writing University of California, Irvine via Coursera After completing this course, you will be able to plan and write a more sophisticated argument essay. Academic Literacy Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology via Coursera You will learn practical tools and effective strategies for increasing your academic vocabulary and grammar so that you will write well-structured coherent academic texts. Scholarly Communication Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology via Coursera Scholarly Communication is a concise but comprehensive course on how to write research papers in English.

Writing in the Disciplines Professional Development Course HE Excelsior College via Canvas Network This course on Writing in the Disciplines offers a modular curriculum that explores the meaning of genre, why and how to develop genre-based writing assignments, and effective techniques for using writing to enhance learning.

Report Writing at University and in the Workplace Coventry University via FutureLearn Have the chance to improve your skills in academic writing and better understand business and academic reports. Writing in English at University Lund University via Coursera This course aims to give you an understanding of the conventions of academic writing in English and to teach you the components and benefits of what is called process writing. After successful completion of this course the learner will be able to write reports on various academic activities including research effectively and efficiently.

Write Your Screenplay: The Craft of Story, Structure and Script free trial available via Skillshare Write Your Screenplay is delivered in short, snappy and fun classes by Joshua Dickinson, a screenwriter, actor and director who teaches screenwriting and filmmaking when he is not working on film sets where he has been involved in feature films and TV projects as diverse as westerns, crime dramas and zombie apocalypses.

Find out how to communicate your ideas through well-written engineering reports. Writing in the Sciences Stanford University via Coursera This course teaches scientists to become more effective writers, using practical examples and exercises. Topics include: principles of good writing, tricks for writing faster and with less anxiety, the format of a scientific manuscript, peer review, grant writing, ethical issues in scientific publication, and writing for general audiences.

Now it is. This course is an invitation to let your inner songwriter step into the sunlight. An Introduction to Screenwriting University of East Anglia via FutureLearn This online course explores the key concepts and fundamental principles involved in the process of screenwriting. Technical Writing Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology via Coursera The course develops technical writing skills necessary to communicate information gained through a process of technical or experimental work.

The course highlights the factors that determine the degree of technicality of the language and concepts involved. Learn how to properly write a scientific paper, based on international standards, and effectively make a presentation to submit proposals for funding.

As the title indicates, over the next four weeks, we will be looking at the important task of writing of text-based requirement statements. Qualitative Research Methods And Research Writing Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur via Swayam Qualitative research methods serve to explore the grey areas that remain outside the confines of quantitative predictive research in human behavior.

English language for competitive exams Indian Institute of Technology Madras via Swayam The course aims to help participants develop their English language skills, particularly those planning to appear for competitive exams that test their English language abilities.

Building your Screenplay University of Cambridge via edX This course will broaden your understanding of how to start a career successfully as a professional screenwriter, as well as offer you insights in how to maximise and enjoy the processes of your personal creativity. I would like to write children books and I am interested in taking a course to help me with that.

Have you ever found any learning resources for that? I would also love to improve my children-book writing skills. I really enjoyed this course. I would like to improve my English writing skills that helps me for report writing and I am very interested in taking report writing course.

I enrolled already and want to do my master of Science in Infection Prevention and Control through online and I am interested in taking a course to assist me in managing my study. I am a retired senior citizen [85 years] who enjoys writing. My plan is to refresh my writing skills and I am searching for an online [graduate level] academic writing refresher course.

Any recommendations will be greatly appreciated. My e-mail address is popsmurph77 gmail. Dear sir, I am engineer , i job iptv company but my writing English knowledge is very poor ,please tell me how to improve writing skill such as email writing, mag writing etc, please any body help me.

Dear sir,I appreciate your programs which help a big number of people from different corners of the world. So as a student of school of journalism,I would like to improve my English in terms of writing skills,and I wish you to help me become a future storyteller. Whatever kind of English you want to write, mastering essential English grammar is essential.

Here is a good site wher you can check out the main topics of English grammar, including points not always dealt with in grammars, such as style and sentence-structure. Dear Disqus, i am interested in writing essays so i can write excellent journals, articles, and assignments as well. It gives helpful hints to improve your writing. Read more about this app in my Hemingway Editor review. Slick Write is a worthy grammar and writing checker.

You can check for sentences starting with the same word, misplaced conjunctions, and long sentences. There is a limit of , characters, which is approximately 30, words. But this should be ample for most writers. However, I noticed it works a little slowly for long texts. It is better to work with smaller chunks of less than 5, words.

Grammar Lookup is another good choice for an online grammar checking app. It started checking for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors almost immediately.

It is a good app for checking short-form writing, such as blog posts and short stories. The first name writers associate with word processing is almost always Microsoft Word. It is the default writing tool for many writers, bloggers, and authors. But it is definitely not cheap. Microsoft Office is, as its name implies, software for office use. It includes Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint, and other programs.

You will never use these software programs for creative writing. Do you need to pay for all these extra programs to have a word processor to write a blog post, article, or short story? What is the best word processor for writers? Are there free writing software tools equal to Word? If you want to write, you can always find great word processors that cost you nothing to use. Often they come with many other options and tools that are better suited for writers. Most of them will be suitable for your writing goals and any form of short creative writing project.

But you should note that a word processor is not the best app for writing a book. You can find better programs for authors in the next section of this article. Like Microsoft Office, Google Docs is a suite of office tools.

The big difference, of course, is that Google Docs is available for free online. If you are familiar with Word, you will have no problem at all adapting to Docs, which is the word processor component. Unlike some word processors, Docs has a word count so you can keep track of your word count goal. I know that many writers, particularly content writers, use Google Docs because of the simplicity of sharing documents online.

Writing projects can be quickly and easily shared using Google Drive, which comes with 5 gigabytes of storage. It is usually plenty of storage space for writers. You can also use Docs offline. If you are writing every day and working with other writers, content editors, proofreaders, or editors, Google Docs allows you to collaborate with ease. If you are a Mac user and all you need is a word processor, Apple Pages can handle everything you could possibly need to do.

Word processing in the page layout document view is easy to work with. All the text formatting, fonts, and writing tools are easy to find and use.

It also auto-saves directly to your hard drive or your iCloud drive when you are online. There is also the file duplicate function. It gives you very easy version control of your revisions and edits.

It is difficult to think of a standard feature or function in Word that is not available in Pages documents. There is one other area where Pages shines. It has a lot more control over images compared to Word. One other big plus with Pages for authors is that you can export directly to epub.

You can download it from the Mac App Store. These two writing programs are already under your noses. They are installed by default on Windows and Apple computers. However, they are both worthy of mention because of their usefulness in converting to plain text. Most word processors can add a lot of background code over the time you take to write a long document. Cut and pasting, saving, deletions, forgotten tabs and spaces, and formatting changes all add up to a lot that can go wrong.

Because of all this code, there is a chance that the text might have issues when you use it online. It can be especially true if you use WordPress and also in publishing in ebooks. The quickest and easiest way to clean a document, big or small, is to copy all the text into a basic text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit. You can then convert everything to plain text.

Then you can copy back the clean text into your blog editor or word processor for ebook formatting. However, many writers now favor Libre Office. These two office suites branched from the same development stable, so they have a lot of similarities. However, it uses traditional and straightforward menus, toolbars, and icons but does not have the ribbon function found in Word.

In some ways, this is a good thing because it lets you get on with the writing process instead of hunting in ribbons for buttons. If you want simplicity, AbiWord is well worth trying. It has been around for a long time now, and while it might look a little outdated, its functionality is not.

The best way to describe AbiWord is uncluttered. It is ideal if you are looking to write distraction-free. However, due to its print limitations that require an external program to see a print preview, it might not be the best alternative to write your book.

Like other alternative word processors, it has all the standard features you would expect, and it works with most file types.

One of its key features is that it allows drag and drop paragraphs, which can, at times, be practical. While Excel has had this for years, Word never has, so working on two documents at the same time is much more efficient in WPS. Free Office gets a mention because it can export. It is a convenient tool for self-publishers. Apart from that inconvenience, it has all the advanced features you would expect in a modern word processor. It comes with advanced formatting options, the ability to create databases for bibliographies and footnotes, as well as track change.

All you need is your free Dropbox account to use Dropbox Paper. As well as being a text editor, you can add audio, images, Youtube videos, Slideshare documents, and Trello cards. It really is a great free writing app for you to create documents and then share them with your team or online. FocusWriter is a simple, distraction-free writing environment. It uses a full-screen hide-away interface that you access by moving your mouse to the edges of the screen.

It allows the program to have a familiar look and feel to it. But by getting everything out of the way, you can immerse yourself in your work. Calmly Writer has been designed to help you focus on writing. Zoho Writer is an online alternative to Microsoft Word. Almost everything you do in Word, you can do with this word processor. There are even collaboration tools.

Scribus is an open-source program for desktop publishing. It gets a mention here because it is free, but also because it is such a feature-rich cross-platform program. Perhaps it is not a choice for most authors and bloggers. But you might have a desktop publishing need one day. Are you ready to start writing a book? You need to hunt a little to find good writing programs for writing books and novels. A writing app or author software for a book is entirely different from a word processor.

The best book writing programs consist of many elements. You need plot timelines, character builders, and event tracking. It should also include note-taking and research pinning tools. Here are four of the best book apps and free writing software to help with writing and publishing your books or ebooks. For a dedicated book writing tool, Shaxpir gives you a lot of features in its free version. The Manuscript Builder uses drag-and-drop tools to rearrange your manuscript.

You can change the order and hierarchy of chapters and scenes. So you can find a structure that works for you. You can set your goals and track your progress. You can also keep detailed notes about your characters, places, and events. With the graphic organizer: Kids can brainstorm and organize their ideas as an outline, a diagram, or a mind map. Ideas can be represented by text, symbols, and pictures. With the voice notes: Kids can capture ideas verbally or rehearse and record what they want to say before writing it.

With the word banks: Emerging writers can build sentences by selecting whole words or phrases from word banks called Clicker Grids or use these words along with typing.

Teachers can create custom Clicker Grids to help kids build sentences word-by-word or provide words related to a topic. Teachers can create custom grids for special topics or use grids available through the software. With the graphic organizers: Kids can organize their ideas with words and pictures to prepare for writing.

Students can also access their Kurzweil materials and most tools through various web browsers or the Kurzweil iPad app. With the word prediction: The program predicts words based on frequency of use. It also offers lists to help kids with choosing words. With the dictation: Kids can combine the dictation tool with word prediction when writing.

As they speak words to write, the program suggests words for them to use. With the graphic organizers and writing templates: Students can visually organize their collected notes and ideas as an outline or a mind map in preparation for writing.

Computer software and tablet apps offer a wide range of features to help kids who struggle with writing. Explore free online tools that can help with writing. And for a free low-tech tool, download some of our graphic organizers. Price and availability may vary but were accurate as of March 31, Understood does not endorse or receive financial compensation for the sale of any of these products. Share Software and apps for kids who struggle with writing. Podcast Wunder community app.