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. [...]

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(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!

dotforge

Scholarly is moving to Sheffield!

Scholary has been accepted as part of the summer cohort of the dotforge accelerator.

For the next 13 weeks we are going to give everything to make Scholarly happen.

Scholarly is born!

Our mission is to give everyone the power to write better, faster. We doing this by developing software for computer-assisted authoring of documents, bringing Natural Language Technology to market to provide automated proofreading and assistance much beyond grammar and spelling. 

In our collective history, we have gone from hammer and chisel to papyrus, from printing press to typewriter and from there to computers, which now automatically check your spelling, punctuation, grammar, and to a certain degree, style. Why don’t they also check your structure? Why don’t they tell you “it’s a very clever thing you’re saying there, but somebody said something similar before, look, here’s a reference”, or “that paragraph has five different ideas in it, you might want to split it up, like this”? How about, “you need to get rid of 2000 words, so I suggest you cut this, this and this”?

The technology to deliver this is mostly available and ready for prime time. 

Writing is an act of communication, and communication is perhaps the most human of traits. We aim to use the technological know-how and wealth of knowledge resources of an increasingly interconnected world to augment the human capacity for written communication. We want to help everyone write better, faster.

Join us in our mission at www.scholarlyessay.com