Are you having trouble with academic writing? It's no surprise that many students struggle in this area, as academic writing is significantly more formal and rule-bound than casual writing.
In fact, each piece of information must be properly cited and referenced. Additionally, different essay formats such as APA, MLA, and Chicago each have their own unique sets of rules and guidelines, which can be overwhelming and confusing for students to navigate.
Luckily, AI assistants are here to save the day and make your life easier. Let's dive in and discover the best AI tools for academic success!
TL;DR
- Students often deal with academic writing tasks throughout their academic careers. The most common academic writing they will encounter is essays.
- The best AI tools you can use to improve your academic writing tasks are TextCortex, Grammarly, Quillbot, Writesonic, and ChatGPT.
- Zeno Assistant by TextCortex is an AI assistant designed to help the writing process from beginning to proofreading.
- ZenoChat can facilitate the research and essay-writing process of students with its customizable data and persona features.
What is Academic Writing?
Academic writing is a specialized form of written communication that prioritizes accuracy and innovation to effectively convey knowledge. In other words, academic writing is a type of systematic text-based information transmission and sharing determined according to global rules. Academic writing is a formal style of writing used in universities and scholarly publications.
Most Common Types of Academic Writing
Academic Writing has different purposes and types within itself. A few of the most common academic writing types are:
• Essays
• Research Papers
• Opinion Articles
• Short Reports
• Case Studies
• Persuasive Papers
Essays are undoubtedly the most common type of academic writing that students encounter throughout their academic careers. From literature reviews to research papers, students are required to produce a wide range of essays covering numerous topics. The primary purpose of these essays is to examine existing literature, identify gaps in knowledge, and contribute to the cumulative knowledge in their field.
Main Elements of an Essay
To write a high-quality essay, you must first know the main elements of an essay. An essay has three main parts in total: introduction, body, and conclusion.
The introduction part of the essay should be equal to 10% of the total number of words of the article and should have a thesis statement describing the topic of the article. For example, if your article consists of 300 words, the introduction part should consist of 30 words.
Essays' body parts should have 80% of the total number of words in them. In this section, each paragraph should convey a different piece of information and be related to the thesis statement. You must also cite a different academic source for each paragraph. You need to use examples and evidences to support your body part argument.
The conclusion part of the essay should have a 10%-word count of the entire article, a general summary of the essay, and a reiteration of the thesis statement.
How to Use AI Tools for Essay Writing?
AI tools can be used to write the 3 main parts of the essays. For example, you can use AI chatbots for thesis statement ideas while writing the introduction part. Also, you can use AI writing tools to provide examples and evidence in the body section. For the conclusion part, you can use writing tools with summarization features or AI chatbots.
Best AI Tools for Essay Writing
Just as not every academic writing is of the same quality, not every AI tool can generate an output of the same quality. For this reason, we have listed the best AI tools for you that you can use for your essay writing!
Grammarly
Grammarly is an AI tool that can help you improve your academic writing with its various features. The main function of Grammarly is its spelling & grammar checker feature. Thanks to this feature, you can correct grammar mistakes in your essays. Grammarly provides suggestions based on your writing goals. For this reason, remember the adjusted goal before using Grammarly for essay writing.
Another valuable feature of Grammarly is its plagiarism checker. Thanks to this feature, you can ensure that your essays are plagiarism-free. Original content is critical in academic writing; mostly, no more than 20% of text coincidence can be tolerated, while anything more means the text is not original.
Another feature of Grammarly, still in BETA, is auto-citation. This feature will work on the same system as its grammar checker. It will notice the citation errors in your writing and give you suggestions to fix them.
Quillbot
Quillbot is an AI tool that has everything you need for academic writing. Also, it is available as a web application and Chrome extension. Quillbot's features include;
• Paraphraser: You can use this feature to rewrite your paragraphs.
• Grammar Checker: Allows you to correct spelling & grammar errors in your writing.
• Plagiarism Checker: It measures the originality of your writing.
• Summarizer: Summarize your long piece of text.
• Citation Generator: Allows you to generate citations in commonly used formats such as APA, MLA, and Chicago.
• Translator: You can use it to check academic resources in different languages.
Writesonic
Writesonic is an AI tool designed to meet users' various writing needs. Writesonic is available as a web application and Chrome extension.
Writesonic's features include;
• Chatsonic: AI-driven Chatbot.
• Article & Blog Writer: Allows you to write articles from scratch.
• Paraphrasing Tool: Instantly paraphrase your text.
• Text Expender: Expend and lengthen your text.
• Article Summarizer: Summarize any piece of written content.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that generates output to users' text inputs. With ChatGPT, you can complete tasks such as summarization, expend, article writing, essay writing, and grammar & spelling fix. If you purchase ChatGPT's Plus membership, you can complete your research process using the latest Google data and GPT-4.
TextCortex: The Best Writing Assistant for Essays
If you're looking for an AI tool that promises to meet all your essay writing needs and more, TextCortex is designed for you. TextCortex is available as a web application and browser extension. TextCortex has 60+ templates for its users and is integrated with 4000+ websites. Thus, you can continue to use TextCortex wherever you are on the internet. Also, you can freely use all the features of TextCortex in 25+ languages.
Features
Since TextCortex aims to meet the various writing needs of its users, it has all the features required for essay writing. As a student, the TextCortex feature you will most often use for essay writing is Rewrite. TextCortex's Rewrite tab's features include;
• Rewrite: Rewrites your texts with different words.
• Fluency: Rewrite your texts with more fluent words.
• Tone Changer: Changes the tone of voice of your texts, including the formal tone you can use for essay writing.
• Simple: Rewrites your text with simple words by removing complex words.
• Creative: Rewrites your text with a creative sentence structure.
• Expand: Generates paragraphs using your existing text or a few words.
• Summarize: Shorten your long texts to a few sentences.
All the features of TextCortex are not limited to these. If you are looking for more detailed AI essay writing assistance, you should try TextCortex's Zeno Assistant.
Zeno Assistant
Zeno Assistant is designed to streamline the writing process of users, increasing their productivity and efficiency. With Zeno Assistant, you can complete all tasks from brainstorming ideas to outline creation and from proofreading to generating continuation sentences. Zeno Assistant's features include:
• Fix Spelling & Grammar
• Make Texts Longer/Shorter
• Simplify the Language of Your Text
• Creating Blog Posts/Essays/Outlines/Social Media Posts
• Find Action Items/Meeting AgendasÂ
• Summarize/Break Down/Rewrite
• Continue Writing
ZenoChat
TextCortex comes with the most functional conversational AI called ZenoChat. ZenoChat is a multi-functional conversational AI designed to provide users with a human-like conversation experience and meet their needs. Since ZenoChat is powered by GPT-4 and has a web search feature, it can answer your questions using up-to-date academic sources. If you are looking for an AI assistant while researching academic subjects, then ZenoChat is designed for you.
You can train ZenoChat with your own data and customize its persona. You can use the knowledge connectors feature to train ZenoChat with your own data. All you need is to head to the TextCortex web application and integrate any plugin from arbitrary URLs or even PDF files.
ZenoChat has 12 pre-set personas designed for different purposes. If you want to build your own digital AI persona, you can use TextCortex's customize your AI feature. Thus, you can build an AI assistant to help you with academic issues and complete your academic tasks such as research and essay writing.