How do you use Bible Gateway? Most people use Bible Gateway for its most obvious function: to read and engage with the Bible as part of your spiritual walk. That’s gratifying to see, because making Bible Gateway relevant and helpful to your personal, everyday Christian experience is our primary goal.

But that’s certainly not all that Bible Gateway can do. One of the ways that people have put Bible Gateway to use for them is as an aid to their writing. Over the years, we’ve heard from all manner of published authors—from best-selling novelists to academic writers to Bible study authors to bloggers—about how they’ve used Bible Gateway to make their writing easier.

We recently asked several dozen writers to tell us how they use Bible Gateway. Here are their tips for using Bible Gateway to help your writing.

1. Use the parallel Bible feature to compare how different Bibles translate the same passage.

“I love the split screen options when I am studying Scripture. I typically have the NIV translation in the left window and then scroll through other translations in the right window. Insights and clarifications emerge as I read multiple translations.” — Sharon Hoover

One of the simplest and most practical tools on Bible Gateway for writers is the parallel Bible view, which allows you to easily see how different Bibles translate the same verse or passage. It’s simple to use—once you’ve looked up a Bible verse (say, 1 Corinthians 13), just look for and press the button in the top left to open a second Bible alongside your original choice:

You can press that button repeatedly to add up to five Bibles side-by-side:

For a complete step-by-step tutorial for viewing multiple Bibles side-by-side, see this blog post.

That’s one way to compare different Bible translations. But there’s another less-well-known option that’s perfect if you want to quickly compare how every English Bible translates a specific verse. This trick only works when you’re looking at a single verse, but if you’ve looked up a verse (say, John 3:16), look below the verse for the …in all translations link:

This is useful for a number of different reasons. First, seeing how different translators render the same material is a great way to both get at the core meaning of a Bible passage, and to notice fresh nuances that different translations bring out. Second, if you’re looking for just the right translation of a verse to cite or quote in your writing, it’s an easy way to compare different options and determine which would be most appropriate for your audience. For example, writer Anna Schaeffer, who writes material for teens, compares verses in different Bibles to find the translation that’s most accessible for her young audience.

2. Master the keyword search to quickly find out how and where topics are discussed in the Bible.

I appreciate the highly customizable keyword search feature. — Thomas Horrocks

You probably know how to use our search box to quickly look up a Bible verse or do a search for a particular keyword. But that’s just scratching the surface of the ways you can use Bible Gateway’s search engine to comb the Bible for exactly what you’re looking for.

Searching for simple keywords is useful for most everyday Bible reading purposes. But when dealing with very commonly-used keywords—for example, the word “love”, which appears many hundreds of times in Scripture—you’ll almost certainly want to narrow the results down to make them more useful for your research. (If you’re writing a Bible study about how that word is used in the epistles, you don’t want your search results clogged up with hundreds of verses from other parts of the Bible, for example.) To gain more control over your searches, you’ll want to visit the Keyword Search Page.

The Keyword Search Page lets you very precisely define how you want to search the Bible. In addition to narrowing your search down to specific books or sections of the Bible, you can use this tool to search more than one Bible translation at a time.

There’s so much you can do here that we’ve written up an in-depth blog post specifically about how to get the most out of the Keyword Search Page. Rather than repeat all of it here, we’ll direct you to this blog post explaining the ins and outs of the Keyword Search Page.

3. Check commentaries to explore the meaning and context of a passage.

“I take frequent advantage of the ‘STUDY THIS’ feature which puts great tools at my fingertips for free (ie. study Bibles, commentaries (Matthew Henry is my fav!), dictionaries and encyclopedias. Bible Gateway provides a variety of reliable biblical information with just a few clicks. It’s super easy to use – no learning curve nescessary.” — Jennifer Anderson

“I have shelved my 20 pound Strong’s Concordance and fully rely on Bible Gateway.” — Susan Shipe

Writing about Scripture, or incorporating it well into your writing project, requires more than just finding the right Scripture passages to use. It means understanding them, so that you can help your audience understand them too. Some of you, particularly pastors or academics, might have a huge library of print commentaries, dictionaries, and other study references to help you dig past the surface of the Bible text. But did you know that much of that reference material is freely available at Bible Gateway, right alongside Scripture? If you don’t have a Bible study library—or if you’re getting tired of hauling those hefty tomes out every time you want to see what Bible scholars have to say about a verse—you’ll want to make use of the Study This feature.

Accessing reference material on Bible Gateway is simple. To start with, just look up any Bible passage—say, Genesis 1. See the blue Study This button above and to the right of the Bible passage? If it isn’t already open, click or tap this button:

Opening the Study This drawer (or bookshelf, if you prefer to think of it that way) shows all of the Bible references available to you. It looks like this:

This panel lists the types of reference materials available to you which have content related to the Bible text you’re reading. The number to the right of each resource type shows you how many individual reference works contain relevant content. When you click on a resource type, you’ll see that some resources are free, and others require a paid Bible Gateway Plus membership. There’s plenty of free material to get you started, but a Bible Gatewaply Plus membership greatly expands your library to include not just classic Bible references, but best-selling modern works as well. Click here to learn more about Bible Gateway Plus.

For a complete step-by-step tutorial showing you how to access Bible commentaries and other reference materials on Bible Gateway, see this tutorial blog post. If this is a Bible Gateway feature you’ve never explored, it’s well worth your time and will help you more confidently write about the meaning and significance of Bible passages.

4. Copy, paste, and print verses directly from Bible Gateway.

Bible Gateway allows me to copy and paste Scripture into blog posts and link back to the exact Scripture…. It helps me not misquote Scripture. — Nikole Hahn

This is a very practical writing matter: are you using Bible Gateway to copy and paste Scripture into your manuscript, blog post, or other writing project? It might seem obvious, but copying and pasting Scripture straight from the Bible text, rather than re-typing it yourself, is a good way to keep typos or other mistakes from creeping into your Scripture quotes.

If you’re copying and pasting Bible verses from Bible Gateway, you’ll benefit from taking a moment to understand what the text display options let you do. The display options let you toggle off and on text elements like verse numbers, headings, and footnotes:

If you’re pasting lots of Bible text into a document but find yourself repeatedly going in to tediously delete things like verse numbers, you can save time by toggling those elements off using the display options. Here’s a guide to using the display options.

Don’t forget that you can easily create a printer-friendly version of a Bible passage, too—a printable version of the passage that strips out the Bible Gateway website images and other elements you don’t want to print out. You’ll find the Printer friendly button right next to the display options button above the Scripture text; here’s a quick guide to finding it.

5. Use our Bible annotation features to take notes and record insights as you read.

When researching and planning your writing project, you probably take a lot of notes. How do you take and store those notes? Maybe you use a good ol’ physical notebook, a computer file, or an organizational tool like EverNote. But did you know you can highlight and take notes on Bible passages right within Bible Gateway?

You’ll need a free Bible Gateway account to take advantage of this feature, but it’s well worth it if you want an organized way to take notes and record insights on specific Bible passages. This video explains how to do it:

Your notes, highlights, and favorites are stored online and can be easily accessed (as well as edited or deleted) at any time.

Make Bible Gateway Your Own

We’ve just covered an awful lot of information—and we hope that you’ve taken note of at least one or two new things you can do with Bible Gateway to make your writing a bit easier. Your writing is unique—so there will be some Bible Gateway features you find indispensable that other writers may not need to use at all. But we hope that you’ll get to know Bible Gateway well enough to make it your own—to identify the ways it can help you, and to get the most out of those features to make your writing easier and as faithful to God’s Word as possible. Enjoy exploring these features, and if you’ve found another way to use Bible Gateway in your writing, don’t hesitate to share it with us!