This is a nifty little tool that you can use yourself, but make sure to share it with your students as well. Paper Rater is a free online service that will check your work for not only grammar and spelling – sometimes picking up things that the built in checkers in Word or Pages miss – but also for plagiarism, readability, and originality.
All you need to do is visit Paper Rater and then copy and paste the body of your work into the analysis box. You must give it a title! As an option, Paper Rater can check your sources if you provide them. Select the education level of the author (from 6th grade to a Doctoral student) and the type of paper you have written (essay, report, letter, review, etc) then click on “Get Report”.
Once complete, Paper Rater will generate a report of the writing in the text submitted:
Students can click on the options above to see the specific suggestions about word choice, style, vocabulary use and mote. Within these suggestions, Paper Rater will list items such as how sentences are started, the use of transitions, over use of clichés or certain phrases. Paper Rater will even assign the paper a “grade” if it’s more scholarly writing, or the readability and creativity if that is more meaningful to the student.
While this is a help to students writing papers, Paper Rater could also help teachers in grading, if you have an electronic copy of students work and want to check sources of for plagiarism quickly. Creative writers and beginning authors could also benefit from a quick analysis once in a while to check readability and phrasing, especially as Paper Rater offers some writing suggestions based on its analysis, and not just numbers!
Best of all, unlike other programs that offer similar services, Paper Rater is fully functional, user friendly and free!
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