My Go-To Recommended Tool for Academic Writing

My Go-To Recommended Tool for Academic Writing

While taking multiple classes during my Undergraduate Degree that require great writing skills, I noticed that most students had trouble with proofreading and fixing their grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation. Even if some of those students tried to, reviewing and editing a document that is thousands of words long can be difficult and there is always something that may be missed. The same thing would happen to me. Most of the time I would proofread, but I would always miss a few errors that would end up lowering my grade significantly. 

All that changed when I discovered Grammarly.

Grammarly is an application/browser extension that finds those mistakes for you and suggests the best fixes. That includes any text that you write while you are on a browser and even text that you write in applications like Microsoft Word, Slack, and many more. Because of Grammarly, I do not have to worry about spending my time reading every single sentence over and over again to find the small mistakes that I made. Not all suggestions are necessary. When that happens you can just click ignore or add to Grammarly’s dictionary so that the application will not bother you again about it in the future.

Grammarly is pretty flexible since it lets you choose which websites you want and how you want it to act on each website. Some of the choices are checking for writing suggestions, showing definitions and synonyms via double click, correcting spelling automatically, and many more. 

Furthermore, if you have Grammarly enabled, it only takes up a small space on your screen. There is one small circular green button in the bottom right of the browser or application which you can click for a panel to open up. That panel shows you the more detailed explanations of your potential errors. If you do not like clicking that button there is no problem. Additionally, every mistake is marked with a red line which you can click on and select if you want to change the word or avoid the suggestion.

Grammarly is also supported on mobile phones and works as an extension of your keyboard.

There are a few applications that are not supported by Grammarly yet, but there is a solution for that as well. You can open a new document at Grammarly and copy/paste your text there which will give you all the feedback that you would get in a supported application or browser.

The best part is that it is completely free. There are more advanced versions for writers or businesses but as a college student, the free version of Grammarly covered all of my needs.

If you are writing regularly and you find yourself making errors, you need to start using Grammarly.

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Angelos Mandilaris

Angelos is a first-year graduate student of the Center for Information and Communication Sciences program at Ball State University. He is an EMDD graduate assistant and plays for the BSU Men's Volleyball team.

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Stay Connected Through Video Games

“This is an industry that’s about community. Video games are bringing people together." — Stanley Pierre-Louis, chief executive of the Entertainment Software Assn.

Stay Connected Through Video Games

Having lived in three different countries during the last seven years and four different cities, staying in touch with my friends has been a challenge. Also, as I am not the best when it comes to texting and calling, there has been only one thing that helps me stay in touch with my friends. Video Games.

Yes, I know. To think that video games, which require me to stay “locked” in my room, help me socialize sounds quite absurd. My parents, like almost every other parent I believe, used to tell me over and over again to turn off my console or computer and get out and socialize. Maybe ten years ago, they were right, but nowadays, most games are played online where you have the option to compete against your friends or team up with them and take over the virtual world of your choice.

How else would Angelos that lives in Indiana manage to take part in an activity with Aleksa from Belgrade, Serbia, with Kostas from Athens, Greece, with Krzystof from London, England, with Greg from North Carolina, and Dimitris from Arizona?

Video games are the only solution I have found. Even if I was more consistent with texting and calling, it would not be enough to keep a relationship as strong as one where the people can participate in an activity together.

There have been multiple times where many different things have been happening in my life and even though I sometimes text with my friends, I do not feel like I want to share it with them. While playing video games though, I have noticed that I am much more likely to share any personal news or thoughts, or ask them for help about something important.

After the COVID-19 breakout in March, I appreciated them even more. I was one of the few people that stayed in my college through quarantine.  Almost all of my friends went back home, and since I was supposed to stay indoors, I barely had any face-to-face interaction with anybody. So, once more, video games helped me solve the problem that the quarantine had created.

Now, am I telling you to stop going outdoors and play video games all the time? Absolutely not. There is no better way of socializing than going out of the house to meet with friends but when the situation does not allow that, video games may be the best option.

Picture of Angelos Mandilaris

Angelos Mandilaris

Angelos is a first-year graduate student of the Center for Information and Communication Sciences program at Ball State University. He is an EMDD graduate assistant and plays for the BSU Men's Volleyball team.

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Student Story
Interview with Ian Gonzales

Recently, Emerging Media Design and Development Graduate Student Ian Gonzales’s research paper: Overlapping Expectations: Studying the Genre Relationship of Ecocritical Genres was accepted by the

Read More »

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Remembering The Meaning Of Your Research

"I think this is where the heart of academic inquiry really lies: questions that pull at your curiosity and inspire your passions"

Remembering The Meaning Of Your Research

As far as origin stories go, mine is traceable to one specific moment.

During my time as an undergrad, I had very little experience with digital media. I never played video games. I pushed against what I thought was the “smartphone fad” for awhile. I didn’t even have a Netflix account. I read hardcopy books. I rented documentary DVDs from the university library. I listened to illegally downloaded music on my refurbished Zune MP3 player. If you listen closely, you can hear the stereotype of the millennial digital native shattering.

I wasn’t trying to be a hipster. I had just never been immersed in the digital world until I forced myself to be. I enrolled in the digital media minor offered at my university. The very first day of classes, my professor showed the class something I will never forget: the interactive documentary Bear 71. This digital story about the life of a grizzly in Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada was unlike anything I had ever seen. It was fiction and nonfiction at the same time. It was a documentary, but something more. I had never felt more immersed in a story before.

Bear 71 sparked my interest in digital stories and led me to the EMDD program today. When I began brainstorming possible topics for my thesis during my first year, I always came back to Bear 71. Why had it intrigued me? What was it about the digital setting of the story that had gripped me more than traditional documentaries? I think this is where the heart of academic inquiry really lies: questions that pull at your curiosity and inspire your passions.
I have to remind myself of this fact whenever I get in deep with research jargon and contrasting opinions while writing my thesis. The working title for my thesis is currently, “Interactivity as a meaning making tool in interactive documentaries: a user experience study of Bear 71.” It even makes me roll my eyes, so I can only imagine the reaction of someone who doesn’t eat, sleep, and breath this stuff every day. I have to keep asking myself, “Why would anyone care about what I have to write?”

But then I think back on Bear 71, and how much I cried at the end of the bear’s story. I look back at how ubiquitous digital worlds have become in our culture in the last decade. Words like “interactive” and “meaningful” have become so overused that designers and audiences alike lose perspective of what these terms mean and why they matter. The technicalities of academic writing can undermine passion and muddle the potential applications of such in-depth topics. But even a tiny peek outside of the academic bubble can be an integral part of the research process.

It’s easy to observe the ways and tools people use to engage with new information. That’s interactivity. It’s easy to see how people change their opinions, values, and understandings based on the information they perceive. That’s meaning-making. And it’s easy to see how the things we as creators make affect how people interact and make meaning out of the information we present.
That’s user experience.

What isn’t always easy is remembering why the things we study as academics, researchers, and creators matter. Sometimes all it takes is a moment of reflection on how we came to ask these questions in the first place.

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Jessica Pettengill

Jessica Pettengill is a 2017 graduate of EMDD. She is currently a writer and digital media producer in Pasdena, CA.

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Student Story
Interview with Ian Gonzales

Recently, Emerging Media Design and Development Graduate Student Ian Gonzales’s research paper: Overlapping Expectations: Studying the Genre Relationship of Ecocritical Genres was accepted by the

Read More »

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