

I want to help you write better... - raffi
http://www.afterthedeadline.com/hn.slp

======
joel_feather
Yikes, you're making a _fundamental_ mistake. A mistake that can destroy your
business. What is a "request"? This is your mistake - it's not at all clear
what your pricing involved.

You see, when I write, I spell check the document about 20-30 times. And your
thing only allows 80 requests in a month. Is that a joke?

Explain what a request is, otherwise I look at the pricing page and shut it
down, because it's totally overpriced. Now, if you you would say each article
I write gets spellchecked for $0.063, no matter how many times I spellcheck
it, then I would be fine with that. But everytime I spell check I pay that
amount? Ridiculous!

And I think it's also a bit unclever how you did the pricing.

You should go like this: "Get your article professionally spellchecked for
7cents. That's all you pay". People don't pay per month, they just pay per
article. However, the minimum amount they can put on their account is $5. You
can't actually put 7 cents. And there should be no monthly recurring bill.

~~~
raffi
Thanks. I'll clarify this on the site. I arrived at the numbers using data I
collected about the behavior of my beta users over the past 90 days. One of my
users is a blog with eight writers on staff and they do nine requests/day. If
the pricing is wrong, it'll change.

~~~
joel_feather
That's the mistake - maybe people actually only do 9 requests per article. But
the _think_ they do a lot more. I personally think I do about 1000 spell check
requests a month, but I don't know because it's not something I've ever
thought about.

So you may have very concrete data on actual usage, but have you also looked
at what users think about your pricing?

------
daleharvey
I just copied and pasted a blog post I was writing into this and it worked
incredibly well, a few minor issues with the tinymce editor, and one or two
naive suggestions. however it picked up a lot of good suggestions.

------
maukdaddy
Great idea for a start up Raffi! I hope a lot of sites integrate your
technology, because writing and grammar on the Internet is atrocious. My only
fear is that people who don't bother to learn appropriate English are the same
ones who wouldn't even both to fix mistakes. [Non-native speakers excluded of
course]

------
sgrove
I'm actually working on integrating this into my site right now because the
writing of our users will affect our public credibility, so this type of tool
is crucial. Thanks for all the amazing work raffi!

------
DTrejo
It annoyed me that the best suggestion was not at the top of the right-click
menu. Most people don't like having to move their mouse more than needed. See
picture for more clarification: <http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/10047/atd.PNG>

The style subsection demo retains a couple of errors after following the
suggestions of ATD (though I guess if the person checking it is paying
attention, they would notice and fix up the sentence).

The grammar subsection demo does not catch the missing hyphen in one-hit
wonder (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-hit_wonder>).

I'm loving it Raffi. I use it to check my HN posts.

~~~
raffi
AtD biases heavily against false positives. If it's too noisy, using it is
more work than it's worth. I only flag a missing hyphen if P(WordB|WordA) >
P(WordA-WordB).

------
10ren
Pasting in your welcome note, it misinterprets "have a fancy". But overall, it
seems pretty good (e.g. it picks up a repeated "you you" in joel_feather's
pricing comment, which I never would have seen).

I think this is pretty comparable to Word, and what you're really offering is
that same functionality on a different platform _viz._ blogs.

It would be very cool if when explaining things like "passive voice", it gave
an example of a revision of the specific text in question (instead of a random
example). Of course, that's hard to do (approaching AI), so you'd probably get
Eliza-like responses much of the time. And you only need to be comparable to
Word anyway.

------
ajm
Who'se been a busy body then? After getting over my disappointment that you
can't help me write better (I need to write more to achieve that) and
realising that this is a WordPress-centric spell+style+grammar checker, I had
a quick look around and liked what I saw. Looking good, well done and good
luck.

------
jseliger
This is not going to help you write better any more than naive grammar
checkers will, many of which did things like check for passive voice. If you
want to write better, check out William Zinsser's On Writing Well.

~~~
raffi
This statement seems unfair. I'll back up my claims:

1\. I help you find errors in your writing. Despite the limitations of
spellcheck and misused word detection they are still a valuable safety net to
have.

2\. The style checker is useful for helping you write better. Writers like to
come up with massive lists of pet peeves. Memorizing these lists is too much
for a human. After the Deadline automatically flags this stuff. It isn't the
same as a human editor but it does help.

3\. A good copy editor will flag and revise most cases of passive voice and
hidden verbs. After the Deadline doesn't rewrite these for you but it does
flag them. This is a useful service to call your attention to these things.
See: <http://jaffeerevises.com/Nominalizations.htm>

4\. After the Deadline explains your errors when you make them. When you write
in passive voice you can click "explain" and learn what passive voice is. If
you use the wrong indefinite article you can click explain and learn why it is
wrong. I see these as teachable moments and by giving you snippets of grammar
info when you need it, I am helping to make you a more aware writer.

BTW I recommend Write to the Point by Bill Stott. Will checker out Zinsser's
work.

~~~
abefortas
In case you missed it, (a very nastily formatted copy of) Orwell's Politics
and the English Language is on HN's front page at the moment.

------
10ren
I love the poem in the "Detects Misused Words" demo, and it will appeal to
early adopters. Good marketing. It doesn't pick up _all_ the misused words
(only about half), but that would be a big ask.

------
peregrine
I remember when you showed us this on the #startups channel. I was impressed
then and now I'm even more. Great work!!

------
kapitti
Congrats Raffi - glad to see the progress since we talked on the train ride
from TS4AD Boston.

------
patcito
Most web browsers already have spell checking.

~~~
raffi
This paragraph is from a NY Times article. Can you find the error in it?

Still Mr. Franken said the whole experience had been disconcerting. “It’s a
weird thing: people are always asking me and Franni, ‘Are you okay?’ ” he
said, referring to his wife. “As sort of life crises go, this is low on the
totem poll. But it is weird, it’s a strange thing.”

Neither can the spell checker in your browser. Why? Because most spell
checkers do not look at context. After the Deadline does.

Visit <http://www.polishmywriting.com/nyt.html> to see the answer.

Besides misused word detection (and contextual spell checking), After the
Deadline checks grammar and style as well.

~~~
frossie
Besides the spelling mistake, is "As sort of life crises go" a valid
expression? Should that read "As far as life crises go"?

~~~
norova
I was thinking the same thing. In fact, it distracted me so much that I missed
the "poll" mistake. :P

------
jdbeast00
i tried "I be smart" and "Thus sucks" and nothing was underlined. Did i not
read the directions properly?

------
hypermatt
Cool product idea, I suck at writing.

