Designing A System To Find An Online Paper Editor?

I am not going to kid anyone here: I always need help on my writing. Go through all of my blog posts and you will find many grammar mistakes. (By the way, yes, I could send all of these posts through r3ciprocity.com, but I really want to make these blogs raw and from the heart). I find writing very difficult for a number of reasons. It is time consuming. I struggle with getting my words out. I never know how to form the right structure. I am anxious. Not to mention, I really struggle at spelling and constructing sentences. Often, I do not know if a certain structure is grammatically correct, and most of the time, I just wing my writing, rather than use an online paper editor. Even if you talk to me, I often find it difficult to get my ideas out in a coherent way. Ask my students, they will tell you that my chalkboard spelling is very bad. 🙂

Everybody Makes Grammar Mistakes When Writing

A few years ago, I wanted to get help with my writing, but there was no convenient way to get this help. Writing courses offered at my institution often appeared to be outside of my schedule – I am an Assistant Professor of Strategy / Entrepreneurship / Innovation, and having time for things outside of my own paper writing appeared to be outside the question. 🙂 Yes, that meant that my writing would be inferior, and sort of stuck in a local minima of performance. In order to get better, I would have to investment much more time in writing courses, or find some sort of online paper editor.

I thought maybe I could use some online paper service. However, many online paper services just seemed so shady, and I did not feel comfortable with them. For example, some of the most popular keywords in Google search in this area are things like ‘cheap dissertation writing services’, ‘do my essay’, ‘college essay writing service,’ etc.

And, as a Professor, it stresses me out that there are so many grey markets for essays, and I did not know which sites were legitimate and which ones were not. While I am cool with being efficient with your time and energy, as long as you are upfront with it, but this grey market stuff worried me. Yes, there is no guarantee about the quality of essay or papers written by the online paper services, but the bigger issue is the intellectual property infringement and plagiarism that are quite likely to occur if you don’t address this problem.

The crazy thing is that these grey markets for paper services are not really the fault of the people using them or the people that are writing essays or papers for others, but rather that there is no legitimate alternative to help people with their writing. Everybody makes grammar mistakes when writing, so it is no surprise that people will feel anxious about their writing, and resort to these kinds of services. As someone who studies innovation, this reminded me of the grey market that was around when people first started trading peer-to-peer music. People traded music for free because they had no viable legitimate alternative that allowed them to listen to music online. Now with Spotify & Pandora, there is virtually no reason to get music online illegally.

Designing A System To Find An Online Paper Editor

I thought, well, I can build some sort of proofreading software as a service that might prove to help me with my writing, help out others, and possibly help address this grey market paper writing service issue. I thought that everybody makes mistakes when writing, and I am not alone. There has to be many people that need to get help with their grammar and writing. I thought that there are many common grammar mistakes that a sharing economy proofreading software as a service can capture.

However, I wanted to make this proofreading tool much different that what is current available online. In my head, I wanted to create an online paper editing system that helps people get help on their writing, essays, blogs, etc. by making it easy to use and a central new way of doing work in a legitimate way. I was well aware of some amazing things that were going on in crowdsourcing, so I thought about combining the power of peer feedback and crowdsourcing to create a proofreading software that worked with my schedule and helped me learn how to write more effectively. Rather than just a simple forum website to find an online paper editor, I wanted to create a system encourages people to help others by pointing how how they could improve their work, to create a system that encourages people to do their best, and to make it difficult to ‘cheat.’

I thought that if I wanted to exploit peer feedback and crowdsourcing, that it would make sense to base it around the sharing economy. The sharing economy has a lot of advantages, such as the ability to identify people that have extra resources, the ability to get empirical measures of the quality of users (i.e. star-rating systems), and ease of use. The sharing economy also allows people to find geographically dispersed others that are willing to help them, and those people might be of higher quality than folks that are found locally.

One thing that we do know in research on the sharing economy and why people give their time to help others online is that social norms like reciprocity are quite powerful motivators. Given the fact that reciprocity is so powerful, I wanted to create the system around the idea of reciprocity. Not to mention, that the idea of reciprocity really appeals to the kind of person I am. So, I designed the reciprocity proofreading software to be based on credits. The idea is that you can either purchase or earn credits to get your documents proofread, but then create motivational pop-ups and other systems to help people stay motivated and have fun.

At this moment, r3ciprocity.com is a minimum viable product. And, I use it for simple paper jobs, and it appears to work amazingly. I am super impressed with people.

I am trying to build it out, and I have plans to make it better. Please mind with the construction dust, hiccups, and such with the software. However, if you see where I am going with this idea, what kind of things would you suggest? It might be fun to get your thoughts and ideas.