How Students Can Use iOS Apps to Improve Their Writing and Research Skills

The present generation is defined by fast-paced lifestyles, but the demands of academic success move at an even faster pace in education.

The availability of apps on iOS offers countless ways for students to use technology to enhance their academic work. Whether students write essays, reports, or research papers, develop organizational skills, or report on findings, using the right app can help them achieve a higher level of output, greater quality, and a higher degree of confidence.

Here are some practical ways that students using iOS products can improve as writers and researchers. If you’re short on time or need expert help, services like Ukwritings offer professional support.

They can help students and reply to their “do my dissertation” request with high-quality writing and research assistance, ensuring students meet their academic goals.

1. Use Note-Taking Apps to Capture Ideas and Organise Research

One of the simplest and basic steps toward better written and researched work is to gather note, image and link in one place effectively.

As long as the iOS app has an inbuilt text-recognition function or a camera to snap pictures, apps like Evernote , OneNote and Apple Notes enable the students to gather information from the web, paste or snap images and add links all in one place and allow them to organise their thoughts, research materials and references more effectively.

Instead of pieces of paper or documents, students can put everything they discover into an app, which will give them an at-a-glance view of all sources at hand every time they sit down to write. Many of these apps allow their users to ‘tag’ people and ideas, search for content, and organise it into folders – improving the overall experience of ‘findability’.

2. Writing Assistance Apps for Grammar and Style

It should be free from grammatical and stylistic mistakes. Apps like Grammarly, ProWritingAid and Hemingway Editor for iOS can look for mistakes and offer suggestions for fixing them in real time. It’s not only spelling and grammatical mistakes they can help with, but also sentence structure, tone and more.

Using these kinds of apps for writing, students can make sure that their words are tidy, business-like and legible.

Instantly, one gets the feedback that is harder to get if one proofreads the piece all by oneself. Besides, doing it this way a student gets to know more about his common mistakes and he knows what to do in order to improve his writing in the future.

Many students turn to the best assignment writing services in Australia to enhance their work even further by accessing expert guidance tailored to their specific needs.

3. Writing Goal Tracking and Statistics

It can be hard to stay focused on writing and deliver finished work on time, particularly when you might have several assignments on the go.

Some apps for writing, such as Scrivener, Ulysses and iA Writer, allow you to make writing goals and track your work. You can keep a tab on how many words you’ve written and what your word-count target is or has been.

Setting daily writing goals, such as ‘Write at least 500 words a day on my dissertation’, helped to keep 72 percent of students on task during a recent survey.

Tracking progress gives students a clear indication of what they have achieved and helps to keep them steady without impeding urgency and panic.

4. Citation and Reference Management

Research papers require citations and reference lists. There are several apps that help students manage their citations and lists.

One such app is EasyBib and the others are Zotero or EndNote. After students enter in the name of the book, articles, or websites, the citations are automatically generated into a list based on APA, MLA and Chicago citation formats.

Let’s compare some of the key features of these popular citation apps:

App	Automatic Citations	Collaboration	Supported Formats	Cloud Sync
EasyBib	Yes	No	APA, MLA, Chicago	Yes
Zotero	Yes	Yes	APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.	Yes
EndNote	Yes	Yes	Over 6,000 formats	Yes

With these apps, student time becomes less wasted and fewer marks are lost because of mistakes due to citation – a common frustration for these busy and nervous students.

5. Mind Mapping Apps to Structure Ideas

Good writing is premised on a good structure, and mind-mapping apps enable learners to plot out their ideas visually. Programs such as MindMeister, SimpleMind, and XMind help students create visual maps of their ideas and connect these ideas through lines and arrows.

For example, if you’re writing a research paper, you could diagram a puzzle with the main sections and supporting points.

When you’ve figured out how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together, you can write with confidence that you won’t be forgetting anything important or setting things up illogically. Your text will be tighter, more coherent and more focused.

6. Time Management Apps for Focused Writing and Research

Procrastination and distractions can be a major obstacle to productive and efficient writing and research.

Some time management apps – such as Forest and Focus@Will – can help students by allowing them to break a task into small, manageable chunks. Students are encouraged to work for a certain amount of time (say, 25 minutes), followed by a short break. This approach utilizes the Pomodoro technique.

This way allows students to progress at a gentle pace without burning out, and it’s better for concentration because they will be less distracted working in short, sharp bursts. In the long-run, this approach results in better outputs, as the individual becomes more productive as well as of higher quality.

7. Voice-to-Text Apps for Quick Drafting

At other times, your fingers move faster than you can compose in your mind. Apple’s own dictation tool is installed by default in the iOS keys section of the text area – that is to say, the space where you type text – so there’s no need to download or sing up for an additional app.

Other popular choices for voice-to-text note-taking include Otter.ai and Dragon Anywhere. These are great for capturing fleeting thoughts or brainstorming.

If the youngster wants to say something, she can say it aloud as it pops into her head. This way, writing becomes quicker and more intuitive. It also lends itself to a portable practice.

This is exactly how Notability can easily make an ‘electronic’ composition more mobile. I tell my students that if they think of something they want to write about and don’t want to lose it, they can ‘say’ it aloud using Notability.

Then they can copy and paste it into a document later, or even convert it to text in the app itself. Either way, they can type their thoughts into a paragraph and edit them later.

Conclusion

These iOS apps can make students better writers – and, because they provide practical help in the writing process, you won’t alienate them with old-fashioned rhetoric about finding their voices and claiming their truths.

They can help them gather ideas, organize them, polish their writing, refine and defend their work, and stay on task without getting distracted. Instead of feeling overwhelmed and anxious every time they have to write a paper, their brains will get the support they need to produce better work sooner – and with less stress.

No matter what new tools might emerge in the future, however, the underlying idea remains: good writing and research is made easier, more enjoyable, and, ultimately, more successful when the right tools are part of the equation.

More iDevice Central Guides

Share this post

Twitter Facebook Discord Reddit Pinterest Telegram