7 Motivational Writing Tools For Students

It’s common to find students faced with writing assignments that don’t inspire them at all, and they find it difficult to complete them on time. Teachers don’t want any excuses and expect all students to submit well-done assignments on time. The good news is that there are a number of tools that can motivate them to write great assignments. When inspired, students get to improve their writing skills.

Below is a list of tools that students can use for writing motivation:

Online Writing Tools

Sometimes, students find it difficult to get into writing due to lack of motivation. There are numerous online writing tools that will boost their focus and motivation. Below are few listed tools:

Plot Generator

Plot Generator is an online tool that will help inspire and motivate students to come up with creative content in any genre. By picking a category, the tool will provide a student with an extensive list of determinants about the protagonist, his or her interest, character, physical appearance and more.

ProwritersCenter

Collaborating with real experts can help motivate students into better academic writers. An example is ProwritersCenter, a paper writing platform that pairs your project with a professional writer in the relevant niche. Through this collaboration, one gets to deliver their project on time and better understand what academic writing is all about. Check out prowriterscenter.com, for pro effective assistance with essay writing services.

Steller

This social eBook creator provides a visual incentive that can help motivate you to improve your writing skills. It achieves this by enabling you to create image-based books and to showcase your artistic and writing skills. It also helps you learn and regularly practice to express your thoughts and feelings better.

Writing Challenge

Writing challenge is a game-based and a perfect app that can get you started on a creative writing project. It does inspire you to beat writer’s block through prompts that give you hints on scenes, characters, and words that you can use.

Using Technology

The advancement of technology, the information age, and the growing range of high-powered digital devices have all had a great impact on education. The concept of blended learning has changed with the increased internet connectivity and now the physical and the online seem to be happening in the same place at the same time. The Internet has provided easy access to information to students right at their fingertips. Students can embrace technology to their advantage for writing motivation in the following ways:

Backchannel

Students can engage each other academically using backchannel, a simple chat room, and be able to communicate with each other using text during a class lesson. This makes one a participant in the virtual discourse and you get to share links to digital resources with fellow students, get responses from other participants, and improve on the handling of tasks. As a result, one gets motivated and is able to carry out their writing well and with ease.

Push Responsibility to Learners

Pushing initial responsibilities to the students helps give them a stronger sense of responsibility and empowerment. Giving questions and problems for them first to solve and time to find solutions on the internet is a great way to motivate them. Let them put the solutions they have found in class. This helps them come up with good writing skills.

Crowdsourcing and Brainstorming Ideas

Students utilize brainstorming platforms to collect and share their ideas together and be able to collaborate with each other. This helps them debate and discuss the topics. It also enables the teacher to find out what the students know about a particular topic.

Teacher’s Praise

A teacher’s praise is one of the powerful tools that can really motivate students into their writing. There is great power in a teacher’s praise in changing a student behavior, but this only works well if the student takes it positively and finds it reinforcing. It’s important to find an effective way to deliver praise to a student in order to encourage him or her. There are three approaches in which a teacher can use to deliver praise:

• Describing noteworthy of a student’s behavior.
• Praising the effort and accomplishment and not the ability.
• Matching the method of praise delivery to student preference.

Praise is a powerful motivating tool as it enables the teacher so selectively encourage different aspects of students and in turn helps boost their performance, accuracy, and the overall student’s work.

Provide Structure, Direction, and Modeling

It’s important for the teacher to provide the students with avenues and structures in which good writing can occur. This can be achieved through:

• Developing a consistent structure for writing for the students such as giving them new ideas to brainstorm, developing for them a first draft, and assist them in revising to improve content.
• Modeling their writing process by encouraging them to take notes, come up with outlines, and draw mind maps. Also, encourage them to be keeping all their notes for future ideas.

You can also create a class newspaper in which every student contributes their articles of current events.This encourages them to be more creative and acts as a great motivator to their writing skills as it creates competition within the students to come up with best articles.

Student-Teacher Relationships

Having good teacher-student relationship is a key element in helping students develop intrinsic motivation. Therefore, it is important for teachers to develop a high quality relationship with their students.

A teacher can achieve this in the following ways:

• Taking genuine interest in his or her students
• Acting friendly towards them by joking with them, smiling and being supportive
• Being flexible and understand each student's capability and pace
• Not giving up on a student in order to motivate and encourage the weaker ones

Relevance

It’s important to let the students see what they are learning as relevant and important in their lives, without discouraging those students who have difficulties in certain subjects. Presenting the relevance of a certain subject to a student may create interest and help motivate him or her. This will help the student get more engaged in the subject, as the student now sees the relevance of what he or she is learning.

Autonomy

This involves providing students with freedom of choice as a strategy to motivate them and promoting their learning. You can let the students form and choose their group members for given group tasks. Also for their research work, you can let them choose their own topics that are relevant and which they are comfortable with. Let them develop their own ideas for their homework assignments related to what they have learned.

Conclusion

Enabling students to find a purpose for their writing is key to enabling them to come up with high-quality work. Students should at all times be encouraged and motivated to come up with original content. This is important as it will encourage them to focus on their strong suits and also work on their weaknesses. It is important for students to understand the purpose of writing and the role it plays in life so as they understand what it is they are doing and why. The above-discussed tools/tips are sure to help in this regard.

About our guest blogger: Sophia Clark graduated from the University in the City of New York with B.A. in Journalism, 2011. She is a creative writer from New York who loves to share her thoughts with readers. In her free time, she enjoys writing fiction as well as reading it. Her big dream is to publish a novel one day. Connect with her on Twitter and Google +.