Writing something up on the computer in college is something nearly unavoidable, unless you have some superpower where your thoughts instantly transfer to a computer. Students commonly use Microsoft Word, mostly because it’s convenient and transferable for turning in assignments in. However, there’s a new trend, with things like Google Docs, that allow students to write, save, and share online.
One of the best I have discovered is the wonderful Writer:The Internet Typewriter.
http://writer.bighugelabs.com/welcome
This website allows you to write online documents, export them, and have a relatively organized system. Oh, and it sounds like you’re using a typewriter. Yes, the best feature to me is the customizable sound effect of using a manual or electric typewriter.
Writer has many useful features to it. You write on a non-distracting webpage, of which you can customize the background and font color. You can customize the text size, font, and spacing, basic features you get in Word. A running word, character, and page count goes on in the bottom right corner. You can also set word, character, or minute goals for your session or document, which will run in the top left corner. This is nifty if you need to have a certain word count for your essay and you can see a percentage of your accomplishment so far. The page also saves your document every time you stop typing. Meaning, if you’re typing up a report and your computer suddenly crashes, you can pull up your document through writer on a different computer and have everything there. Writer also has an offline mode, which is handy when you suddenly lose WiFi ( hello campus WiFi). You can access recent documents and continue typing if Writer was open previously.
Which brings me to documents. Unlike Word or Docs, you can’t save into folders, but there is a menu with all your documents title, date modified, and word count which is organized into most recently modified documents first. You can also search to find a document. In the free version, you can export, download, save as PDF, and print. You can also just copy and paste into Docs and Word if you need to turn it in differently.
Writer is not the best for organization, but it is far less distracting than Word or Docs, has great features, and the typewriter sound makes writing that report or essay a bit more fun. You can easily type whatever your assignment is and transfer it to Word. It is also super helpful that you can access it from almost any device. It’s the best online writing website I know. I even wrote this in Writer before copying it over!