This Digital Tool Could Be Your New Favorite Writing Instructor

WriteLab is a web application with a clear mission: to help you write better. Users upload or copy and paste their writing to the site, and WriteLab analyzes it using a combination of machine learning and natural language processing, then makes suggestions for how to improve the writing sample. WriteLab also comes with built-in analytics and document sharing capabilities, meaning it allows peer and teacher feedback to be integrated into its assessment. WriteLab is unique because it grounds its feedback in pedagogical principles. Instead of simply correcting a writer's mistakes, this web app makes suggestions and gives explanations for each so that the writer can understand the reasoning behind the corrections and decide which ones they want to keep. For instance, when I used the phrase "in recent years" in my writing sample, WriteLab asked, "What does in recent years add to your sentence?"