Web Resources for English Students

Create Word Cloud Visualizations of a Text: Wordle or Textal on smartphones
Wordle allows you to type/paste text and generate a new version. It jumbles up the words and displays the terms so that the words that appear most frequently are the largest. I have students input text to see if the visualization tells them anything new about the text they are analyzing and its major terms.

Outline Ideas on a Mindmap: Text2MindMap 
On this website you and your students can create a web of ideas to organize thoughts for writing.

Force Yourself to Write: Write or Die
One of my students showed me this website, where you can incentivize your writing by creating rewards or consequences. One consequence, for example, is that if you stop writing for a certain period of time, the site will start deleting your work.

Apply Hemingway's Writing Principles: Hemingway App
Paste in your text and the app will highlight your text in different colors to show wordiness, passive voice, or awkward grammar. When my students write analysis papers and employ useful adverbs (something marked and discouraged here) we discuss differences in genres, the fiction and journalism that Hemingway wrote, versus our analyses, which might need adverbs to evaluate how a text works persuasively.

Identify Over-Used Language with Word and Phrase Frequency Counter: WriteWords
Paste in your text and the site will identify how many times each word (or phrase) is used. One downside to the phrase application is that you have to choose the number of words to count as "phrases," instead of it identifying commonly used phrases.

Check Grammar & Plagiarism: Grammarly
This service is not free, but it looks really useful. Schools can buy a package and even integrate it into Blackboard.

Find Unknown Meanings of Words: Oxford English Dictionary
Most language scholars already know about (and love) the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a grand catalogue of words and their usages. I have students look up words they are analyzing to get useful synonyms and to find any meanings they don't know are contributing to the text. For example, when analyzing one article many students looked up "renegade" and learned that it had religious connotations. You need a subscription to the site, but you can access it from most any college campus or by using the university library's off-site login.

Create Web-Based Instructions for Technical Writing: Instructables
My colleague Garrett Avila-Nichols uses this site in his technical writing class and has had many of his students featured on the website.

Find Films with Certain Characteristics: Internet Movie Database 
If you use the search bar at the top and choose "Keywords" from the dropdown menu, you can find films that contain whatever you are looking for. For instance, when I was working on my dissertation, I needed to find Westerns in which a woman dies in child birth. I used the keyword phrase, "die in childbirth" and presto, a film history without the work.

Find Writing Advice & MLA formatting: Purdue OWL
With the resources available at the Purdue Online Writing Lab and other sites, I don't have students buy English handbooks anymore.

Other Useful Websites for Students
Create Videos with Pictures, Captions, Music: Animoto
Fact Check the Internet: RefDesk
Create a Class Schedule: CollegeRuled
Create Digital Flash Cards: Study Blue
Learn to Budget & Track Your Spending: Mint
Create an Online Database You Can Share: Grubba