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I don't think starting from scratch is the difficult part of writing. You can make a reasonable start simply by writing what you'd say if you were to talk to so
by mrob 10y ago
I don't think starting from scratch is the difficult part of writing. You can make a reasonable start simply by writing what you'd say if you were to talk to somebody about your topic. The difficult part is editing that impromptu speech into something worth reading. The most useful new writing tools would be tools for editing.
- startupdiscuss 10y agoInteresting. Do you have any ideas around what tools for editing might look like/do for you?
- mrob 10y agoGrammar checkers are already useful, but they still have a long way to go before they can match a skilled human editor. Machine learning probably has a lot of potential here. One useful editing technique is reading your work aloud. But it's slow and annoying to do, so I'd like to see a word processor with visualization of the predicted sound of the words. There are already many good audio visualization techniques, but for full effectiveness this needs another tricky problem solved: speech synthesis with natural prosody. Again, this is an ongoing area of research where machine learning could be very useful. I'd also like some kind of refactoring support for moving around blocks of text without breaking dependencies between them, eg. accidentally moving a paragraph where something is discussed to earlier in the piece than the paragraph where it's defined. Automatic detection of these kinds of dependencies would be ideal.