Tools for writing personal statements/essays

[gradrat1]

Hi all,

I'm new to this forum, so apologies if this is the wrong place to post! I'm researching online writing tools for help writing grad school personal statements and essays. Has anyone used anyone used any tool that's helped them? Would love some inspiration...

Thanks!

[GeorgiaTechPhd]

What kind of help/tool are you looking at? 

I believe a personal statement simply requires a document processing tool like Microsoft Word. I personally prefer using latex (one of the free online tools for that is overleaf.com) as there are many templates that i can choose from, and latex takes care of most of the basic formatting issues. 

In addition, another thing that can help you with writing letters is a spellchecker and a grammar tool. Spellchecker is embedded as part of Microsoft Word. If you are using an online tool, a good option to have is the Grammarly extension for your browser. If you have the extension set up, it will automatically check for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors within any text that you type into a web form. 

[Gatech_ST]

For long writing, consider Ulysses it is an amazing writing tool I used for some time, It has an attractive UI and you can divide your writing into different modules which gives you a distraction free experience instead of one giant scroll.

I also use Zotero for citation and reference management (some prefer Mendeley) and thesaurus for synonyms.