3 ways students can reduce stress and create better essays

Now the festivities are over it's time for us all to start thinking about the year ahead. For most students it's time to get to work. Whether you've got a thesis, dissertation or a simple report to write, these student apps will help to maximise productivity, reduce procrastination and even improve the eloquence of your writing.

1  Zotero 

This is particularly good for science students who need to reference, but good for anyone writing essays and thesis. Use it to collect, organise, speedily cite, and share your research sources. 

Get Zoreto here

See this useful short video guide for a Zoreto demo
 

 2 Dragon Dictation

Dragon Dictate is a voice recognition app that listens to you speaking and automatically converts those words into digital written text. Obviously useful for essays, but you could also try it for capturing notes and ideas. If you have trouble getting your words down and prefer to speak, or are dyslexic or have trouble writing for physical reasons, this could ease the pressure. By allowing users to dictate a stream of thoughts and words, it takes the pressure off students who feel it’s difficult to put words on the page while thinking. 

Get Dragon Dictate for iOS, here

There’s a super quick demo of Dragon Dictation here
 

3  Evernote

A popular organisational tool, where you can keep different notes and subjects in order and in separate sections and add and subtract from them when you wish, syncing across your devices. Handily it’s also an audio recorder for lecturers or verbal notes and ideas. You can share notes with course mates too, but this might involve a charge. One extra really cool feature - scan and search - means that if you take pics of whiteboard content or handouts, you can search them using any of the words in the image, because Evernote recognises content within images. In addition, you can write or draw on those PDFs on screen. Try Trello too if you want a project management board where you can see your projects’ workflow really easily and clearly. 

Get Evernote here

Find out more about how Evernote could help you in this video