About Writing Coach

A writing coach built for real practice

Writing Coach gives you one assignment, a few clear goals, and feedback you can use right away. You practice, revise, and track your progress over time.

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How skill practice works

Writing is split into small skills you can improve one by one. A skill might be clear cause-and-effect, better scene flow, or cleaner sentences.

Each assignment focuses on exactly three active skills. Those skills become your target for that draft, so feedback stays specific and useful.

When you show steady control of a skill, the app marks it as stronger and unlocks the next skill in the path. If an older skill starts slipping, it can pause new unlocks until that foundation is steady again.

What you get

  • Assignments based on the skills you need most right now.
  • Feedback tied to clear goals.
  • Revision briefs when a draft needs another pass.
  • A progress view that shows what is improving.
  • A clear path to the next skill.
Focus

One clear target at a time

Most writers feel stuck when every draft is judged on everything at once. This app narrows the target so you can see what changed and repeat that improvement later.

Feedback

Feedback you can act on

Reviews point to strengths to keep, problems to fix, and the next step to take.

Progress

Progress with memory

Old assignments, drafts, reviews, and revisions stay linked. That history helps the app choose better next assignments.

What makes this different

A practice plan, not random prompts

Each assignment is part of a training path. The app tracks what you practiced and what changed.

Feedback with continuity

Each review is tied to that assignment's goals. Later, you can look back and still understand what each draft was training.

How it works

A clear, step-by-step review process

The app uses the same robust set of checks each time so scoring stays consistent. Those checks are focused on your skill goals for this assignment, then passed to AI for plain-language explanation.

What is measured

The app tracks grammar flags, sentence structure, readability, style warnings, repeated phrasing, unclear references (like vague "it" or "they"), and whether key claims are backed by support.

How writing style changes checks

The app picks a scoring guide based on your writing type and track. A technical memo and a story scene are judged in different ways because their goals are different.

How skill targets change checks

Each assignment has a few skill goals. Scoring gives extra weight to those goals. Older skills are still checked lightly to catch backsliding.

Pedagogy

Read the pedagogy paper

Want the academic grounding and design rationale behind this coaching loop? Read the pedagogy paper describing the hybrid objective model, research basis, implementation details, and limitations.

Open pedagogy paper
Open-source checks

Check tools we use

These tools are part of our fixed-check layer. Most are open-source projects. We also use one built-in rules engine.

Heuristic rules engine

This is our built-in rule checker. It catches direct writing problems fast, like very long sentences or repeated weak patterns.

Vale

Vale is a writing linter. It scans your text for style problems, like unclear wording or tone problems, based on rule files.

Open projectLicense: MIT

LanguageTool

LanguageTool checks grammar, spelling, and punctuation. It helps find sentence-level mistakes quickly.

Open projectLicense: LGPL-2.1-or-later

spaCy

spaCy is an NLP library. It breaks text into useful parts so we can measure things like sentence length, passive voice, and clarity signals.

Open projectLicense: MIT

TextDescriptives

TextDescriptives adds extra text metrics on top of spaCy. It helps us track readability and other writing patterns over time.

Open projectLicense: Apache-2.0

Stanford CoreNLP (optional)

CoreNLP is an optional helper service. When enabled, it gives stronger signal on unclear references like vague "it" or "they" chains.

Open projectLicense: GPL-3.0-or-later

AI boundaries

How AI is used

AI is used in limited ways in Writing Coach, mainly to make the interface and feedback easier to read.

Prompt flow
1. Build assignment context
No AI

We collect your writing style, active skill goals, and recent assignment history to prepare the prompt context.

2. Draft the assignment
AI

AI uses that prepared context to draft assignment text in plain language.

Review flow
1. Check the draft
No AI

We run all fixed checks to collect evidence about your writing on an assignment draft or revision.

2. Score with the right rubric
No AI

We apply the right scoring guide for your writing style and focus the review on your chosen skill goals for this assignment.

3. Format feedback clearly
AI

We pass the scoring breakdown and evidence to the AI layer so it can format feedback in plain language with clear, contextual notes.

Open-source credits

Open-source and license attributions

These are key third-party tools and assets used in Writing Coach, with project links and license terms.