Free Online Writing Assessment Tools. Admit it, we’ve all been taught a certain way to write a “paragraph” and a “sentence.” But how does that translate into online writing? I don’t know about you, but when I was in school my textbooks dealt with the concepts of paragraph structure and sentence length, but did not do much to get me ready to write posts for the web. In fact, I think the idea of crafting sentences based on their length made even less sense to me at the time.
Being a better writer can:
- help you to promote yourself to a potential employer or business partner.
- help you to generate actionable ideas and goals that you’ll stick to.
- showcase your intelligence and expertise.
- make you more persuasive and trustworthy.
- assist you in being better understood by others.
Below is a list of online writing tools that can sometimes slip between the cracks of our awareness, which makes them hidden gems in their own right. These tools will help students hone their content and generate beautiful ideas as they become the great writers they were meant to be.
Online Writing Tools for Editing
- Wordcounter—Wordcounter ranks frequently-used words in any given body of text to help you see if you’re overusing any particular words, or to help locate keywords.
- Hemingway—Hemingway helps you write like the great man himself; simple, clear, and bold.
- Cliche Finder—Like the name suggests, use this tool to help you spot any cliches in your content.
- Grammark—One of three copy-and-paste tools featured in this post to help you perform a simple and fast grammar check on your writing.
- Grammarly—Grammarly helps you hone your writing skills by finding and correcting many more errors than a standard word processor.
- Grammarcheck—Paste in your content and do a free check for spelling errors, style suggestions, or grammar suggestions.
- Autocrit—This is an online manuscript tool for fiction writers. Quickly self-edit your work anytime, anywhere.
Online Writing Tools for Writing
- Calmly Writer—Distraction-free writing tools like this will surprise you with their simplicity. Don’t let the blank white screen fool you—click on the icon in the top-left corner for options, or begin typing your thoughts right away.
- Quabel—A free tool with a clean user interface that lets you concentrate and focus on your best writing.
- Writeapp—A free private online notebook app to save and protect all your drafts and ideas right online.
- My Writing Spot—This clutter-free online writing workspace features autosave capability, a word counter, a built-in dictionary/thesaurus, and document groups for organization and collaboration.
- Ohm Writer—The original distraction-free ambient writing space, and still a favourite with writers of all kinds all over the world.
- Focus Writer—This one has a hide-away interface that you access by moving your mouse to the edges of your screen. Available in over 20 languages, it features timers and alarms, daily goals, customizable themes and sound effects, spellcheck and autosave, and much more.
- Ilys—Unlock your creativity by locking yourself in! Tell Ilys how many words you want to write, and then be warned—once you begin you can’t go back, delete, or edit anything until you have reached your goal. It may sound frustrating, but it’s an incredibly useful and challenging exercise.
Online Writing Tools for Brainstorming
- Stormboard—A versatile multicoloured collaborative space where you can add sticky notes, photos, and videos to a shared wall.
- Wridea—Wridea is a web service that lets you share, organize, and improve writing ideas collaboratively.
- Bubbl.us—This is a fun and simple mind mapping tool that lets you organize and plan ideas and present them to colleagues in a clean and stylish manner.
- oTranscribe—This transcription tool lets you use long voice memos or interviews. Add an MP3 or WAV file and start playing it; all controls are located right inside the app, which means no need to be switching between your sound file and your word processor while you transcribe.
- Collaborize Classroom—Collaborize Classroom is a free feature-rich online education platform that lets your students have meaningful conversations and collaborate on creative projects.
Formative Writing Assessment
Writing assessment should not occur only at the end of a project. Instead, you should provide students ongoing feedback throughout the writing process. Give informal comments and focus on the “big three” traits: ideas, organization, and voice. These traits capture the key parts of communication: what a writer is saying (ideas), how the writer is saying it (organization), and to whom the writer is speaking (voice). Word choice and sentence fluency support these three traits. Correctness is important in the editing phase, but if you comment on spelling and mechanics before content, student will focus on surface corrections rather than the deeper issues that facilitate true communication.
You can provide this formative assessment during different types of writing conferences:
- Desk-Side Conferences occur when you stop at a student’s desk to ask questions and make responses. Questions should be open-ended so that the writer can clarify his or her own thinking about the writing.
- Scheduled Conferences give you 3 to 5 minutes to meet with a student in a more structured setting. The student may have a specific problem to discuss or may want you to assess his or her progress on a particular piece of writing. Try to praise one thing, ask an appropriate question, and offer one or two suggestions.
- Small-Group Conferences let you meet with 3 to 5 students who are at the same stage of the writing process. These conferences help students improve their writing and become better assessors.
Summative Writing Assessment
Don’t feel the need to grade everything that students write. Trying to do so would not only be overwhelming but also counterproductive. The work students do during prewriting, writing, revising, and editing should not be graded as such because doing so would short-circuit the students’ ability to write freely and communicate ideas. Also, writing-to-learn activities such as note taking and journaling should not be rigorously graded. You can give a score based on whether students produce a quantity of such material, but you should not do a full-trait evaluation on it. Students need to be able to write to learn new concepts and to gain fluency rather than worrying about every sentence, word, and comma.
Decide which assignments require summative assessment, and then grade the writing following this process:
- Ask students to submit prewriting and rough drafts with their final drafts.
- Scan final drafts once, focusing on the writing as a whole.
- Reread them, this time assessing them using the traits of effective writing.
- Make marginal notations, if necessary, as you read the drafts a second time.
- Scan the writing a third and final time. Note the feedback you have given.
- Complete your rating sheet or rubric, and, if necessary, write a summary comment.
Formative or summative: What’s the difference?
Different assessment tools used by the teacher can be formative or summative in nature, either for shaping ongoing lessons or for grading once the instruction is complete.Formative assessment tools are the quizzes, assignments, and in-class questions and discussions teachers use to gauge and guide (or form) their students’ learning process. That goes both ways, as teachers often use the answers in their students’ formative assessment tools to guide their lesson plans and lectures.Summative assessment tools are the final essays and tests given at the end of a project, course, semester, unit, program, or school year. Teachers use these to evaluate student learning by comparing performance to a benchmark. These are high-stakes exams with a high point value that figure heavily into a student’s grades. Some examples are midterm exams, term papers, and AP tests.
Conclusion
A free online writing assessment tool can be a very useful addition to your learning and teaching to improve writing. Teachers and students will find it convenient and easy to use and to communicate and develop ideas and strategies for improving their writing.