To improve your writing skills, you should read your words aloud.
This was one of my first and most valuable writing tips. Ironicly, I found this advice to be ironic. It required me to change my writing medium to improve my writing. It is still true, even after all these years. Vocalizing your words not only helps to identify typos and incomplete thoughts but also allows you to notice subtleties like awkward turns of phrase or strange rhythms in your sentence structure. Even better, readers will find themselves bored by your text if they read it out loud.
All this is to say that writing is an art form, even for people who love it. It is also a human endeavor built upon non-obvious rules. These complications don't necessarily call for tech solutions, but NoRedInk, an innovative startup based in San Francisco, has spent almost a decade trying help students improve their writing through software.
NoRedInk today announced that it has raised a $50 million Series A led by Susquehanna Growth Equity with participation from True Ventures. The digital writing curriculum uses adaptive learning and Mad Libs-style prompts. GSV, Rethink Education, and Kapor Capital are also investors.
This financing event, which comes almost six years after NoRedInk's Series A, is a sign that the company intends to scale in meaningful ways over the next months and years. NoRedInk will need to tackle its greatest challenge with millions more: the complexity of the subject matter it wants to simplify.
NoRedInk's CEO and founder Jeff Scheur was an English teacher in Chicago in 2012. It was created to help children get more than just red ink on their papers. This is a reference to the fact that teachers frequently use red ink for corrections and suggestions.
Scheur stated that kids get feedback on their papers and don't know what to do with it. They get the grade but tend to throw it away so I began building tools to help them apply difficult-to-learn skills that we expect children to have, but don't explicitly teach.
NoRedInks was founded with the goal of helping students improve their writing skills. This includes how to structure essays, how to remove fluff from arguments and how to properly cite.
He said that one of the greatest challenges in teaching writing is to demystify the process of becoming great writers without reducing the art of expression. This means giving kids lots of personalized practice and helping them to see that there are many ways to write.
NoRedInk's adaptive learning method uses algorithms to identify the strengths and preferences of students to produce an output that is more in line with their needs. NoRedInk asks students about their role models and favorite characters. Then, they create personalized writing exercises that target each student's interests. They then guide them through the writing process with light guidance.
Scheur stated that NoRedInk's goal was to help people learn difficult skills through scaffolding.
More than 10 billion exercises have been completed to date on NoRedInks' practice engine. This data is used by the company to highlight problem areas, shared struggles, and potential blind spots in traditional curriculum for its districts.
NoRedInk offers a limited, free version of its platform to teachers. However, it also offers a premium version that integrates into learning management systems to give schools and districts a view on progress.
NoRedInk may need to dig deeper into drafts as it expands its market share. Is it capable of suggesting tone in the same way Grammarly, an AI-based grammar and writing platform? It appears that it is not.
Grammarly is a fantastic consumer app. It's a modern version of the Grammar spellcheck that Microsoft Word used to do many years ago. Scheur stated that Grammarly is a great app. NoRedInk, which is what schools and districts use for teaching skills, is quite different.
