Textio's Learning Machine Offers Opportunities to Improve HR Writing Xconomy

Remember the English composition teacher who could always find a gentle way to improve that middling passage in your writing? The editor who elevated the lightning bug to lightning? Textio, a Seattle machine learning and natural language processing startup focused on improving job listings and recruiting e-mails for companies including Starbucks, Microsoft, and Twitter, is releasing a new feature that can identify words and phrases that are not bad, per se, but could be better. The company's "opportunities" feature is confined to the rather narrow--and importantly, measurable--world of writing done by recruiters and hiring managers. It only suggests improvements to a few words here and there, rather than providing a wholesale rewrite.