#395 – Tech in the Writing Process: Polishing

#395 — Tech in the Writing Process: Pre-Writing, Polishing

AVID Open Access
12 min

Transcript

The following transcript was automatically generated from the podcast audio by generative artificial intelligence.  Because of the automated nature of the process, this transcript may include unintended transcription and mechanical errors.

Paul Beckermann 0:01 Welcome to Tech Talk for Teachers. I’m your host, Paul Beckerman.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 0:05 Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann 0:16 The topic of today’s episode is tech in the writing process: polishing. Once you’re satisfied with the organization and content of your writing, it’s time to proofread and polish it into a final publishable draft.

When we’re revising, we focus largely on organization and idea development. The polishing or proofreading stage involves more of the detailed editing of mechanics, spelling, grammar, typos, style, and format. You might have improved some of these areas during the revision process, which is fine, but now you’ll focus more specifically on these finer details in order to get it ready for publishing and sharing. Of course, if you think of new ideas and rethink your organization, it’s still not too late to revise those as well. The polishing stage of writing can often be greatly aided by technology.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, or AI, software programs are becoming very adept at catching mechanical errors such as spelling, grammar, and usage, either as you’re writing or later when you’re specifically polishing things up and getting it ready to publish. These AI programs have been trained on millions of writing samples in order to recognize patterns and point out words, phrases, and other elements of usage, grammar, and style that seem out of place.

This is not to say that the computer will do all of the hard work of writing for you. On the contrary, you still need to identify your purpose, organize your thoughts, compose your message, ask the right questions, and develop your style. You also need to review any automated suggestions that you may receive and determine if you agree with the proposed update. Just because software suggests a change doesn’t mean that change is ultimately the best choice for your particular piece of writing.

Technology can, however, do a great job helping you with some of the mechanical aspects, saving you time that you can then repurpose on thinking and composing. Let’s take a look at several digital tools that you might consider to help you during this proofreading and polishing stage of writing.

Let’s count it. Let’s count it. Let’s count it down. Number one: your word processor. As with previous steps in the writing process, the simplest and most available tool can oftentimes be your best choice. That might be your word processor. Most word processors have powerful editing tools built into them. Microsoft Word and Google Docs, two of the most commonly used programs, have similar features, both underlying spelling errors in red and grammar errors in blue.

By either right-clicking or hovering over these marked words, you can review pop-up windows of suggestions and update them on the spot. Click on a new spelling or suggested wording, and your sentence is instantly updated. You can also track your changes, use the integrated dictionary or thesaurus, check out the word count, and translate your work. These features and more can be turned on or off or edited as desired. In Word, you can access these under File > Options > Proofing. In Docs, you can find these settings under the Tools menu.

Number two is Grammarly. Grammarly is a very popular tool. It’s also a freemium product. That means you get some features for free, and other features require payment. It allows you to check spelling, grammar, and punctuation at no cost, and the latest version also allows you to generate new text with 100 AI prompts.

With the paid version, you can also access premium features like sentence rewrites for clarity and conciseness, tone adjustments, plagiarism detection, word choice, unlimited personalized suggestions, generation of text with 2,000 AI prompts, and more. The revision tools generally require the paid version, while proofreading and polishing tasks can largely be completed with the free version. There are several ways to use Grammarly. You can upload your writing into the Grammarly website for analysis, or you can install the Google Chrome browser extension, or the Microsoft Word and Outlook add-in.

Number three is the Hemingway app. This website lets you write like Ernest Hemingway: simple, direct, and concise. If that’s what you’re looking for, this might be a good choice for you. The site offers both a writing and editing mode. You can compose on the site in the writing mode or paste in text from another program.

Once your text has been composed or pasted, you can switch over to the edit mode to have your writing analyzed. The analysis provides a readability level and a word count report, as well as color-coded feedback. Yellow means that you should consider shortening or splitting a longer sentence. Red indicates that a sentence is very complex and potentially confusing. You can rewrite it until the red disappears. Purple indicates words that have similar synonyms to consider, and blue highlights point out adverbs, passive voice, and qualifiers that may be weakening your writing in general.

You can use the Hemingway app for free online, or purchase the premium version and install it on your PC or Mac for additional functionality. The paid version also lets you export your edits, while you’d need to copy and paste your text with the free version.

Number four: ProWritingAid. This program is similar to Grammarly, and allows you to analyze the first 500 words of your writing for free.

To use this tool, you’ll need to set up an account and verify it with an email. From there, you can either use the website version or the Google Chrome extension to analyze your writing. You can write directly on the site, copy and paste your work into the editor, or upload your writing to preserve formatting. ProWritingAid will provide you with grammar and spelling check analytics about readability, sentence structure, overused words, and more. It will also conduct a style analysis that identifies various style elements like passive voice and verb choice. With the free version, you can access a variety of reports and view suggestions that you can either accept or reject.

Number five: Gramark. This simple website is mostly a writing analysis tool, but it does highlight potential problem areas. Like many of the other tools on the list, it provides pop-ups with suggestions.

When you click the submit button, you get an analysis on your writing in multiple areas, including voice, wordiness, sentence variety, transitions, run-on sentences, grammar traps, and more. Adjustable sliders let you alter the analysis thresholds. When you click on the analysis area, it shows you where these potential problems appear in your text, and provides an explanation of why it might be a problem and suggestions for how you might improve that writing. Rather than fixing problems for you, it mostly flags them for your review.

And number six, of course, generative AI. This includes chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Copilot. Generative AI is really good at writing. While you can make an argument that the tone of AI-generated writing can still be stiff and uninspiring, it does a good job of producing coherent, mechanically sound text because it’s been trained on billions of writing samples. It’s learned how to not only produce but also recognize quality writing.

Because of this, it can be a very useful tool for reviewing your writing. You might even think of it as your virtual proofreading partner. To use this, you would paste in or upload your writing and then give the chatbot directions for what type of review and feedback you’re seeking.

For instance, you might tell it to act like a friendly high school English teacher, and then ask it to review your writing for something specific, like redundancy, clichés, grammatical mistakes, things like that. The more specific your request, the better the feedback you’ll receive. In fact, it’s often a good idea to ask a chatbot what it needs to help you. So I asked ChatGPT what it suggests when using it as a proofreader and writing partner with me. It gave me a four-step process to follow.

Number one: provide the text clearly. Paste the full text you want reviewed. If it’s long, consider breaking it into sections.

Number two: clarify your intent. Tell me the purpose of the piece, for example, blog post, formal email, essay, or script. Note your audience: professionals, students, or the general public.

Number three: indicate the tone. Let me know if you want it to sound formal, conversational, persuasive, or something else.

And number four: tell me what you want. Do you want grammar and punctuation checked, clarity and conciseness improvements, rewording to sound more polished, a complete rewrite?

It then went on to offer a longer list of possible questions that I might ask about the writing. Questions included: Can you tighten the language without losing meaning? Does this flow logically? Where could this be more concise or engaging? Can you suggest stronger verbs or imagery? Does this tone match my audience? Can you rewrite this to improve clarity? What parts are redundant or unclear?

How can this sound more active, precise, compelling? Identify mechanical mistakes. Depending on how you word these questions, AI could do the rewriting for you or suggest revisions for you to consider. Personally, I like suggestions, so I’m still fully invested in my writing, and I’m making my own decisions about what edits to make.

If you use this strategy with students, you may want to provide the questions and prompts for them to use with the chatbot. They could then copy and paste the prompt you’ve given them into the chatbot along with their paper. You could also consider creating a custom chatbot that uses your defined parameters. School AI is a great tool for this. Then students can simply plug in their paper and get the feedback you’d like them to have. As with anything AI, you’ll need to determine how comfortable you are having students use this and at what stage in their writing development it makes sense.

Being upfront with students about how they should and should not use generative AI is really helpful and facilitates an open and trusting classroom. In fact, the Laguna Beach Unified School District in California has developed a really powerful Google add-on called AI Trust You, which facilitates this sort of transparent conversation between student and teacher. I suggest you check it out.

I should also mention that this is not a complete list of options. There are many other variations of proofreading tools out there as well. Scribbler and QuillBot are just two more popular options that I didn’t get into. You could look into those as well. While similar, each tool offers something slightly unique. It can be a good idea to explore several of them to find out the ones that will work best for you. The best way to do this is to actually use the tools yourself before rolling them out with your students.

And don’t be afraid to begin simple. Start with the features integrated into your word processor, and then branch out from there as needed. To learn more about today’s topic and explore other free resources, visit AVID Open Access.org. Specifically, I encourage you to check out the article collection, “Power Up and Enhance the Writing Process with Technology.” And of course, be sure to join Rena Winston and me every Wednesday for our full-length podcast, Unpacking Education, where we’re joined by exceptional guests and explore education topics that are important to you. Thanks for listening. Take care, and thanks for all you do. You make a difference.