It’s the day before your essay is due. You’ve had two weeks to write this essay for your English class, yet you decided to procrastinate yet again. Already the false promises begin to flood your head. “I’ll never procrastinate again!” you say to yourself. “I’ll start right when the teacher gives us the prompt next time!” However, we all know this cycle of procrastination will strike again as soon as the next writing assignment is given.

So what do you do? You can’t escape out of this position. Thankfully to this wonderful invention called the Internet, worry about your essay no longer. Shmoop, according to its website, is “a digital publishing company with a point of view. We seek to empower and broaden the range and depth of choices that students have in life. Our teaching ‘method’ revolves around the basic notion that learning is often unnecessarily hard—so we carry gallons of academic WD-40 that we squirt on the tracks whenever we can.” Shmoop offers an amazing, free essay lab that is geared towards helping students organize their thoughts to form into a well-written essay.

I recently used Shmoop to help me with my first AP Language paper, and I have to say, it really made a difference in the way I wrote. The essay lab kept me going with witty yet helpful comments. There are five different essay styles you can choose: analysis, argument, description, college, or literature. Each individual section focuses directly on what you need to be writing about.

First, you are told to simply spill all your ideas down on the paper, regardless of how messy it seems. That was easy enough for me; I had already written on a scrap of paper all my ideas. Then the essay lab prompts you to put those ideas in a more organized outline list. I found the outline to be a very good way to organize my thoughts.

After the outline is finished, you are directed to write an introduction, thesis, body paragraphs and a conclusion. The method is which Shmoop does this is clean, and well thought out. Shmoop recommends that drafting is not “agonizing over the exact usage of the semi-colon.” It was a clever way to simply  describe drafting. Once the essay is written, there are three steps: address the prompt, fill in the holes and “prettify.” I find these steps to be necessary to produce a well-written essay.

This lab does require a lot of thought. Essays don’t come out of thin air, and one wouldn’t expect that this lab would write the essays by itself. With a little guidance from your teacher and a good head start on your assignment, this is a great tool for all high school and college level students. Overall, I would recommend Shmoop to anyone who needs help starting an essay; however I don’t recommend starting the night before.