Although these have obvious advantages (they’re massive, they don’t take space in the server, etc.), their drawback is that they include random language from the web, which also means slang and grammatical errors. We looked into several search engines such as Google and Blekko. The next question was where to get the feedback from. We were happy with those options, but we weren’t there yet. So we decided to add a few options tailored for writing: examples of how your chunk can be used, and lists of words or synonyms that are used most frequently in your selected context. We thought users might want to know more than the number of results. Users could activate the popover, get their info, and continue writing.Īnother question was what feedback to offer. It could be done anywhere.īut with users writing somewhere else, how could the app provide them with feedback? We wanted something non-interfering invisible to the user, but only appearing when requested. This was a good move, as it also meant that the writing didn’t have to be done in a browser window. We figured that, rather than bombarding writers with continuous feedback, it would be better if they could select the chunk of text they wanted feedback on. The feedback turned out to be overlapping, inaccurate, and interfering. As you can probably guess, this wasn’t straightforward to get done and almost impossible to use. Our first idea was to have some sort of live checker, so that users could write in a browser window and would instantly get feedback on what they had written. We needed a tool that would show how often a chunk was used, but it needed to be easier and quicker than using Google. So this is where the idea of Writefull came from. And it’s not just us - as soon as we started admitting this (slightly embarrassing) habit to our friends, they knew exactly what we were talking about. ![]() That is, by endless visiting and re-visiting the Google webpage to enter chunks from our text, and checking how often they were found on the Internet. How did we deal with this? Like most people do: by using Google. These difficulties can make writing slow and painful. Other times we get only halfway: we have a sentence in mind, but we’re looking for a particular word we can’t come up with or we do know a word that would fit, but we just want to use another one. Sometimes we write sentences and realise there’s something odd about them, but we’re not sure what it is. ![]() ![]() The hardest part is judging if we’re saying things the right way. We ourselves have to write a lot for our work - and often this is in English, which isn’t our native language. For those of you who write on a regular basis, it’s nothing new that writing isn’t always easy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |