The evolution of writing

 

Academic writing is painful. I discovered this the first time I had to face writing an essay as a 4^th year undergrad on exchange in London. Outside of the English speaking world, the academic essay is mostly an esoteric art form that is the domain of researchers and academic hipsters. I had never seen anything like it.

There was all this hassle of keeping your paragraphs as tight conceptual units within the greater scope of your argument, with their own internal structure, then having to back up anything you said with what other people had said before and this absolute obsession with not using someone else’s words without attribution. Pile up on top of this dealing with the formatting, keeping to the strict word length, and writing in “the language of science” and you can see it was not an easy year. But I learned the system, and became a better writer and a better communicator because of it. [...]

Read more...
(Guest post on The Literary Platform)

We met this chap the other day

 

Nick Clegg visited the Electric Works last week to see for himself what the dotforge programme has to offer (photos just in).

We had a nice chat about how Scholarly is going to take writing to the next level and empower everyone to write better, faster. Ok, essentially we pitched to the Deputy Prime Minister. Claim to fame!

Coding hard

After three very intense weeks of workshops and customer development, we have finally reached the development stage.

Given the limited time at our disposal, we are working towards the Scholarly product vision incrementally by taking on one feature at at time.

We are already working hard on rolling out our first feature: Reference Discovery. This should be most helpful for students writing their dissertations or researchers. The functionality is straightforward: upload your draft / paper, click a button and you will be presented with relevant references to the subject area, your specific topic and related papers to those already cited.

Our beta sign-up is live, if you would like to help beta test Scholarly, don't hesitate head over to the form!