Mary Gevorgyan

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Stories By Mary Gevorgyan

  • 5 online tools that will improve your writing

    You need to constantly practice and improve on your mistakes if you want to become a better writer. As the famous English author Neil Gaiman once said, "when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right". The great thing about the internet from a writing perspective is that there are a plethora of tools available online to help you identify your mistakes and become more proficient at writing. Read on to inform yourself of five great online writing tools that'll get you closer to where you need to be with your writing. 1. Grammarly Every writer worth his salt should be using a Grammarly because of how convenient it is. Simply add this grammar tool to your favorite browser, and whenever you input text in an email, on social media, or any other text field, Grammarly will highlight any grammatical errors you make. The tool even includes a short description of the error so that you are less likely to repeat your mistakes. Don't assume Grammarly is a panacea that'll eliminate all grammar errors, though. You still need to proofread your writing; this tool just eliminates a lot of the hassle. 2. Essay Writing Service UK One of the best ways to get better at writing academic essays or dissertations is to read high-quality model answers. Essay Writing Service UK provides superior sample essays on almost any subject you can think of. The inherent usefulness of this service is that it'll help teach you what a good essay should look like, and you can then use this knowledge to improve your own essays and get the grades you want. Essay writing is a particularly tricky skill to improve at on your own and hiring an editor isn't an option for most people. This service is an ideal alternative solution. 3. Hemmingway App Hemmingway App is a wonderful free writing tool that makes your writing much more concise. By pasting your text into the editor, the tool highlights sentences and words that are too complex. You can then edit any complicated sentences until the highlight marks are removed. The idea behind many forms of writing is to deliver a message to a specific audience, and this tool helps you to do that as succinctly as possible. 4. Pro Writing Aid Pro Writing Aid is a nifty editing tool that provides some excellent basic resources to help improve the flow of your text. You can choose between numerous writing styles and the editing tool will adapt its feedback specifically for that style. There is also a premium option that gives you access to an abundance of advanced editing features. 5. Tomatoes Maximizing productivity is an essential part of being a good writer. Tomatoes is a free online time tracker that makes use of the famous Pomodoro technique. By writing in 25-minute 'sprints' and taking a 5-minute break after each sprint, you'll maintain an intense level of focus that'll help you get a lot of writing done, while ensuring your mind remains fresh. After each four sprints, you take a longer break of up to 20 minutes. In truth, any old timer could be used here but Tomatoes keeps track of break times too, making it ideal for accurate application of the Pomodoro technique into your writing schedule. By utilizing some of the above five online writing tools, you're bound to become a better and more efficient writer.

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  • How To Stay Safe When Shopping Online

    Shopping has never been easier than it is nowadays. Products arrive quickly, the deals are generally better than in stores, and who can beat the convenience of browsing through thousands of products from the comfort of your own home? Unfortunately, with such easy access to thousands of e-commerce sites, many people get carried away with themselves when they see an apparent bargain, and they fall victim to online fraud. According to Business Insider, there were 27 fraudulent transactions out of every 1,000 in the fourth quarter of 2015. You could write a book on how to avoid fraud when online shopping, but really it boils down to following a few simple and important steps before engaging in any transaction. Read on to find out exactly how to stay safe when online shopping. 1. Search For The Lock You should never share your credit card information on a website that is not encrypted by SSL. The easiest way to check for the presence of SSL on a given page is by examining the address bar in your browser. At the beginning of the address, you should see the letters "https", and a lock icon should be displayed either beside the URL or at the bottom of your browser, depending on the exact browser you use. The above image is an example of a site that utilizes SSL on its payment pages. This is extremely important because it is the best layer of protection from credit card scams. 2. Research New Sites Many articles on the topic of online shopping safety tell people to only shop from well-known websites such as Amazon or Ebay. The problem is that this limits your options when hunting for a bargain. The best way to stay safe is to research any e-commerce site that you've never heard of. You can use a tool like Web of Trust to perform your research. This website review service gathers user ratings for websites and uses these ratings to give a website safety ranking. To use MyWOT, type the URL of the e-commerce site into the search bar and click on the search icon. You'll be presented with a score card like this. The result you're concerned about with the WOT tool is the trustworthiness score; this needs to be green and ideally over 85 for any safe e-commerce website. You can also scroll down for in-depth user feedback. The old idiom applies with online shopping that if a deal is too good to be true, it probably is. You should automatically be suspicious of any site that offers ridiculously good deals. Use a tool such as WOT to assess safety or simply Google search "name of website" and "scam" to see what other people are reporting. 3. Use Strong Passwords It is extremely important to use watertight passwords when shopping online. If your Amazon account – or any other online shopping account was hacked – your credit card would be at the mercy of the hacker to do with as they please. The easiest way to create a really strong password is to use a random password generator, such as the one found at passwordsgenerator.net. You can specify passwords to be any length ranging from six right up until a mind-boggling 2048 characters. Sixteen characters will suffice for the purposes of remaining safe while using online shopping sites. Summary There are many more tips out there on how to stay safe when shopping online, but the crux of it comes down to these three key points. Checking for SSL will ensure you are extremely unlikely to have your credit card info stolen. Using a service like WOT will help you decide if an e-commerce site you've never heard of is safe. Generating a really strong password will ensure nobody can get inside your existing accounts and clear out your bank account by purchasing everything under the sun.

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  • Is This Website Safe? The A-Z to Safer Browsing

    If you think it's the world around us that is dangerous, you've probably been extremely lucky in the global net. The Internet is the easiest "place" to get people trapped and to set up websites that corrupt personal information, the users' computers and cause lots and lots of other damage. When you use the web, there are lots of websites that belong to the "ol' good" category- you have been using them for ages and you seem to know them inside out. You type just one letter in the search box and the website is suggested to you- so there we go. In these cases you are probably safe. But what about websites you are going to access for the first time? What about the dozens of links that end up in your mailbox? And what about that cute video your friend shared on Twitter? There are billions of sources online, and knowing how to single out the ones that are potentially dangerous may be a good favor to yourself. Ask yourself the important "Is this website safe?" question before you jump to using it. Whether you use Windows, or Linux, Mac, Android or iOS, there's a strong chance that somebody (or, actually, a whole army of fraudsters) are waiting in all-armed mode to get at your personal information. Data means money, and you're nothing more than a dollar sign to the bad guys. So, if "is this website safe" is an actual question for you, let's look at just a couple of ways of building a fence around fraudsters and browsing smart, starting with the basics. 1. Check verification status Start by checking the address bar to see whether the site is verified. The largest browsers like Chrome and Firefox have a sign in the left corner of the search bar to indicate whether the website is safe or not. Most large, safe sites will be verified, and therefore the address bar will display either a location or a safety ranking: Looking to left side of the location bar you will be able to see a sign indicating that the site has been verified as legitimate. Clicking on the green sign will display a bar with some details on the website. Note that in case the website is not verified, you will see a different sign. 2. HTTPS vs HTTP Checking for HTTPS instead of the less-secure HTTP in the address bar may save you from lots of trouble. Although HTTPS isn't foolproof, it is still indicative of more reliable web resources. 3. Use Google Safe Browsing Check the website with Google Safe Browsing. To do so, simply type https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/safebrowsing/diagnostic/#url= followed by the name of the site under question. This simple query will let you know if the website has hosted malware in the past 3 months. 4. Use a reliable antivirus Many websites will start throwing malware at you before you even manage to look at the address bar. For instances of websites flooded with malware and adware, use an antivirus. If the moment you hit "Enter" there comes in a security report, then the website safety question becomes, well, kind of rhetoric. You may try AVG or another reliable antivirus to avoid scammy websites and ones full of PUPs and viruses. 5. Refer to the wisdom of the crowd The good news for any website visitor is that, quite probably, you are not the first person asking the "Is this website safe?" question. There are billions of connected Internet users and many of them will review popular (and not so popular) websites, giving you a hint on whether you should be browsing through them. The Internet is rich with specific reputable communities that share information on lots of websites. One quite old and reputable resource from this perspective is mywot.com or the Web of Trust community (WOT). How do you check whether a website is safe? First, visit the website and type in the website URL in the search box. The results will indicate website safety scores marked as "Trustworthiness" and "Child safety", based on a hundred per cent scale. If we look at the example of a website, say, Ted.com, we will see the following picture in Web of Trust: This indicates that 95% of all users find this website trustworthy and reliable, and 94% consider it safe for children. These are rather high scores, so we can conclude the website doesn't hold any potential danger. If the website were dangerous, we would have a lower score that would mean you had to beware. See this example on WOT: However, make sure you don't restrict your search to looking at the reputation scores only. Right below the scores, you can find a large pool of user reviews and make sure you know all the potential threats. 6. Check for redirects This is not a rare thing: you start browsing through a website and everything seems to be just fine. A couple of minutes later you end up browsing through quite a different web resource. How did that happen? Simple! You got redirected. If the website redirects you to another resource, beware. And of course, stop right there if you were about to make a payment unless you were redirected to PayPal! 7. Some additional activities: a. Check the website information on WHOIS to make sure it's legit. b. Look for the website's terms and conditions and find the part that deals with use of personal data. c. Google a bit more Drawing some Conclusions Asking is this website safe before visiting a web resource is a very good idea. In the end, you are saving yourself from potential danger. Though this is not a restrictive list and there are many more things you can do to check for website safety, these steps are enough to guide you safely through potential danger spread out there on the web. Make sure you follow these steps and it will be much harder for fraudsters to have you trapped!

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