This article is for anyone who is studying and needs to produce essays for their course, but has real difficulty with the following challenges:

• Distractability,

• Lack of concentration and focus,

• Overwhelm,

• Fear of getting poor grades.

Read on to find out more about what you can do to be able to overcome the above challenges.

What is National Essay Day?

This yearly event takes place on the 28th February and celebrates the work of the founder of all essay writing and birthday of, Michel de Montaigne.

Born in 1533, Michel De Montaigne became a leading philosopher during the period of the French Renaissance as well as being responsible for creating the literary genre, the Essay.

The aim of National Essay Day is simply to promote essay writing as a literary form by which anyone can explore their ability to write about any topic that interests them.

But essay writing isn’t really that easy for many though, is it?

Here at Aventido, we are very aware of just how difficult writing essays can be, especially within the context of writing coursework for college courses when there is a deadline as well as the potential anxiety about the grades that the coursework may attract.

For students with neurodiversity, writing an essay, at first glance, can appear difficult especially if they do not have strategies in place that can help to unlock their inner ability to write.

Useful links and resources for overcoming the difficulties of writing essays.

Read on to find links and resources that will help a student who struggles with essay writing overcome their difficulties.

Mind Mapping and Text To Speech is a ‘Dream Team’ for neurodiverse students.

This article explores how difficult it can be for neurodiverse students to write coursework and how two pieces of assistive technology being used together can bring about a more interesting piece of work with great spelling and grammar accuracy despite the challenges that can come from being neurodiverse.

Mind Mapping – used for expressing and manipulating ideas in a visual and creative way that can be exported into an essay format within Microsoft Word. We recommend MindMeister software for this purpose.

Text-To-Speech – Software that reads out text on a screen. A useful tool for proof-reading essays after hours of writing them. Hearing it read out can be an effective way of detecting written errors in spelling and grammar. We recommend ReadSpeaker TextAid software for this purpose:

Mind Mapping and Text to Speech is a dream team solution for neurodiverse students

Working Memory, Dyslexia and Writing: A key strategy for success from James Wright.

In this article, James from Aventido shares a video about how working memory issues can hinder the ability to write essays and he speaks from his own experience as someone who is dyslexic. James then demonstrates how using Lightkey, an AI-driven spelling and grammar checker makes writing easier by making suggestions for words and phrases based upon James’ use of the English language. The software not only reduces the need to stop and make decisions about which words to use (thus interrupting the creative flow), but also reduces the number of keystrokes required to generate essay-based content thus improving productivity.

Working Memory, Dyslexia, and Writing: A Key Strategy for Success

Understanding the challenges that come from being neurodiverse that can affect collating research at university.

In this article, we explore how difficult it can be to get all the information together that is required to write good essays within a university context. Often one needs to collate reference content first and be able to record the citations in a bibliography that are written in a required format by the university body. Just doing this can bring an extra level of complexity to essay writing that can be overwhelming thus increasing the probability of procrastination and losing key information.

The article goes on to talk about how Pro-Study, a leading software tool for organising research, can help students to collate and use their research references as well as organise into a useful bibliography in the correct format.

Understanding the challenges that come from being Neurodiverse that can affect collating research

Final Words.

Everyone has differing capabilities when it comes to writing essays. Assistive Technology can be a useful way of unlocking the inner writer in the face of cognitive difficulties relating to neurodiversity.

The team at Aventido provide demonstrations and training sessions on the most cutting-edge software that is currently available to help students unlock their potential, especially when writing essays.

Use the link below to find out when our next webinars and events are taking place showcasing how assistive technology makes such a difference to students studying with neurodiversity.

Aventido Events & Webinars