September 7, 2015 in Analyze This

Analytics-based program has the ‘write’ stuff

Vijay Mehrotra

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https://doi.org/10.1287/LYTX.2015.05.08

As a business school faculty member, I have been hearing for years that the ability to write well still matters mightily [1], even in our increasingly data-driven business world. Most recently, the 2014 Graduate Management Admissions Council’s annual survey of more than 550 companies from 44 different countries around the world found that employers valued communication skills more highly than anything else [2]. And while many courses include opportunities to make oral presentations and receive feedback, MBA students typically receive little training on how to write effectively [3].

Of course, effective writing is a skill that can and should be taught long before graduate school. And so much of learning to write is about coaching, feedback and revision. But in today’s world of shrinking educational budgets, growing class sizes, and an increasingly large population of poorly paid and overworked writing instructors, too many students are too often provided with too little of this type of personal attention. The results are all too predictable: too many newly minted graduates with too little capacity to express themselves clearly in writing, with negative consequences for both their current employment prospects and their future employers.

Question: How do we address this vexing problem?
Answer: Analytics!

This is a story about a small company with a big mission. WriteLab, a two-year-old start-up that emerged from U.C.-Berkeley, has developed a software platform that aims to radically improve the way that students learn and practice the craft of effective written communication. Founded by Matthew Ramirez and Donald McQuade, WriteLab’s software application ingests written documents and quickly annotates them with notes and suggestions intended to improve the quality of the user’s writing.

The story begins with Ramirez, a Ph.D. student in English at U.C.-Berkeley. Early in his graduate school career, he found himself teaching a writing class for the first time, spending a huge amount of time grading student papers. Moreover, he soon discovered that the feedback loop was too slow; by the time that students received the papers that he had so carefully annotated and graded, their attentions were focused on other things.

Soon thereafter, his eclectic interests (which include both a passion for the structure of language and a keen curiosity about mathematics and computer science) led him to courses in natural language processing and machine learning at Berkeley’s School of Information. After learning about syntactic parsers, he began to explore how such software might be used to improve the lives of writing students and writing teachers.

Around this time, he met McQuade, a professor of English with nearly 30 years of teaching writing to college students. McQuade’s interest was piqued immediately. In December 2013, Ramirez and McQuade launched WriteLab with a vision of using technology to cost-effectively help users to write effectively. Since then, the company has developed a SaaS application that coaches students on their writing and revising, and more than 500 students around the country participated in its spring 2015 beta test. WriteLab plans to rollout its product during the current academic year while continuing to add features and improve functionality.

Like many cloud-based analytics applications, WriteLab sits on top of a complex tech stack. Documents are read in and parsed into sentence-level records that are stored in a Dynamo DB hosted on Amazon Web Services, after which more than 20,000 tags are attached to each sentence (this is clearly a memory-intensive application). From here, a series of proprietary predictive algorithms (written in Python and based on WriteLab’s Style Guide) are used to identify potentially valuable pieces of feedback. The writer/user then receives this feedback within an annotated version of the original document that includes color-coded labels and comments in seven different areas (clarity, cohesion, logic, concision, emphasis, elegance and coherence), and proceeds by either incorporating or ignoring each piece of feedback in subsequent drafts.

In a sense, the WriteLab platform has tapped into McQuade’s deep knowledge and extensive teaching experience while keeping in mind what the company’s data scientists and software engineers believe can be successfully implemented. In addition, its machine-learning algorithms were initially trained on data sets that are hand-classified by expert writing teachers, and continue to be refined as the amount of data processed by the system increases.

Les Perelman is a believer in the WriteLab system. Perelman, a research associate and former director of undergraduate writing at MIT, is a longtime critic of automated essay scoring systems. The Boston Globe has labeled him “The Man Who Killed the SAT Essay” [4]. He first heard of WriteLab prior to the annual meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English in 2014, and claims that he arrived as a skeptic. “I was planning to trash it,” he later admitted to me, “until I realized that it had immense potential.”

Perelman, who subsequently joined WriteLab’s Advisory Board, cited several reasons for the shift in his perspective. First of all, he pointed out that WriteLab’s focus is on writing style at the sentence level, which greatly simplifies the analytical challenge by providing a smaller set upon which to do statistical inference. Also, WriteLab has been built from the ground up as a coaching/teaching tool, unlike many other similar systems that were initially designed to automate the grading of essays (which he vehemently believes they also do quite poorly [5]). Finally, to Perelman, WriteLab’s founders’ first-hand experience as writing teachers is very visible in the product, particularly in the way it asks good questions and gently encourages writers to consider different choices.

In these heady days of analytics’ ascendancy, there are countless start-up companies out there promising to use big data to somehow change the world. At their core, however, the vast majority of these applications are about increasing efficiency, pumping up profits and/or strengthening managerial control. Having spent my entire adult life in this profession, there are days that I wearily wonder if this is really what it’s all about.

Writing is about something else entirely. Two of my favorite contemporary authors, Jonathan Franzen and the late David Foster Wallace, have characterized their writing as “a way out of loneliness” [6], and indeed this same characterization is at the heart of why I write this column. Given all of this, it is gratifying to find an analytics-based platform like WriteLab, whose core mission is helping people more effectively connect with others through the written word. It’s a noble and honorable undertaking, and with tens of millions of students as prospective customers, it’s also a potentially profitable one.

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Vijay Mehrotra
([email protected])

Vijay Mehrotra is a professor in the Department of Business Analytics and Information Systems at the University of San Francisco’s School of Management and a longtime member of INFORMS.

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