What Is r3ciprocity.com?: Editing Software
I created r3ciprocity.com to encourage and incentivize people to help out other writers. The proofreading software encourages peer feedback and proofreading. My focus is on helping academic writers, such as graduate students, but this system is quite useful for other writers as well. Most of us have a lot of anxiety about knowing if our written work is good or not. Also, nobody is perfect, right?! In fact, I am sure that there will be people that will find issues with this blog post. That is the point – we can also use a helping hand with our writing, and a nice collective community can be quite helpful. I find that most people are actually quite nice and wonderful. This software is designed to reduce the anxiety of getting your work checked by other people. Basically, it encourages the proofreading and editing of other people’s work, and the paying forward of peer proofreading. That is why I called it r3ciprocity.com, because you help others before you take.
How Does r3ciprocity.com Work?
This reciprocity proofreading platform feels like a game. You help others edit their writing when you sign up to this online editing app. Each time that you help others by proofreading their writing, you gain credits to have your own work edited. Then, you can submit your own writing on the online software to have others help you out in exchange. Get it. It is an online peer proofreading exchange. To help facilitate and encourage quality proofreading, you can also purchase credits, and those that are good enough at proofreading can convert credits into money. However, signing up and seeing how much it would cost to proofread your document is free, of course. I tried to make it such that the credits were fair for the editor and proofreading your own documents would be quite inexpensive. I provide a bit more details about why I creating this sort of writing-editing matching system in the following video:
What Documents Can You Get Proofread?
People can submit their academic writing, manuscripts, essays, college papers, and such to have their writing checked on this proofreading app. Many documents can be proofread on this type of system, and as demand for it increases, I will build in features to make it easier to find the right proofreader for the right type of document. I am modeling this software after other sharing economy applications, so my focus will be on making the algorithm work better for you.
Why Did I Create r3ciprocity.com?
I realized that we needed this sharing economy proofreading software when I was trying to get my own academic papers and reports edited. The problem I faced was not having a clear idea of who was a good online writing proofreader and who was not. For this work, I was willing to pay a considerable sum, but it was to difficult to find who was worth it. After talking to my academic friends, I realized that finding good academic writing proofreaders was a problem that they all faced. Many people want to hide a good proofreader once they find one. I also realized that most people feel a considerable amount of anxiety when they ask their friends for peer feedback, although we should get peer feedback to improve our papers. I thought, “I am a professor of entrepreneurship / innovation, why not build something that could help a lot of people to solve this problem.” So, I did – I built this sharing economy proofreading software.
Proofreading Software For Academic Writers / PhDs / Graduate Students
I really want to build this online proofreading software out so it helps out academic writers, and graduate students. As an academic, I am trying to build out this software so it fits our needs. I know that it is a bit selfish to focus on my own problems, but I really think that my own academic writing problems are not unique to me. I know that there are many other PhDs and academic writers out there that could use this software.
Again, I have to stress that this editing and proofreading software is work in progress, and I will continue to work with this project just so long as others find it useful. Right now, we really do need more people using it, so it serves a bigger audience, and that we can find the problems with the software. Its a struggle, but I am happy to keep chipping away at it.
How Does Using r3ciprocity.com Help Behavioral Science?
On my way to building this sharing economy proofreading software, I realized that this would be a wonderful way to help science, and not just by encouraging peer feedback. One of the major problems in social science today is finding adequate settings to explore organizational science. Organization science concerns how organizations work, and how we organize as people. We also like to ask questions about what is the best way to design an organization or understanding ways to encourage positive behaviors in an organization. However, finding settings to explore these questions in organization science is quite difficult.
Based on my knowledge of the software industry, it has already figured out many of these problems and how to do good science – it is called A/B Testing. A/B Testing is a common tool to improve software design, but it is also a technique that can be used to explore organization design because software is just a codification of organizations. Thus, I thought it would be cool to have a platform that could combine these features to encourage peer feedback and editing, while allowing for rapid experimentation by other researchers on this proofreading software.
Want to learn more about the organizational sciences and why doing such A/B Testing experimentation is so important? You can watch my video on the difference between causation and correlation:
Anyway, if you want learn more about what I am doing with r3ciprocity.com, I will continue to put out addition blog posts. I am quite excited to create and be apart of this project. I really think a lot of people can benefit from this proofreading software.