Design and Evaluation of WriteBetter: A Corpus-Based Writing Assistant

Corpus-based writing assistants are aimed to show how words are used in real context: they provide word use examples from which users can (1) draw inspiration for their writing and (2) understand how words are used together to improve their own writing. Although the idea of integrating a corpus-based writing assistant (concordancer) into word processors is not new, their integration is designed to be not as straightforward as writing in a word processor. In this paper, we present WriteBetter, a corpus-based writing assistant designed to be integrated into Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and Overleaf. This integration makes its use straightforward and easy as users can see corpus-based examples (1) in real-time while writing in the word processor or (2) just selecting a piece of text in their document. This facilitates user-corpus interaction as the required user's interaction is minimal. After contextualising the state of the art regarding the benefits of corpus-consultation, we discuss the design features of WriteBetter that make it novel in relation to other tools. Next, we present a user evaluation of the first version of WriteBetter, which was carried out on 11 undergraduate students of a Chilean university, who were asked to trial the software while writing in English. Based on this evaluation, we designed a new version of WriteBetter, which was further evaluated online on 36 users. WriteBetter is now available for everyone as SaaS.