Write & Improve
Improve your English through practice and feedback!
We have developed Write & Improve, a free service for learners of English to practise their written English, along with a range of Write & Improve + subscription products.
Using Write & Improve
Write & Improve draws on 20 years of research into the written work of EFL learners in Cambridge exams to create an easy-to-use, low-stakes, friendly, online environment that encourages students to practise, reflect on, revise and improve their writing.
Use cases
It is used by students and teachers around the world for:
self-study and exam practice
classroom-based writing practice
extra practice in mixed-ability classes
homework
Workbooks & Tasks
Students and teachers choose from a wide range of essay prompts or create their own tasks in a shareable personal or class Workbook.
Write, Reflect, Revise, Improve
Write: submit an essay and receive automatic feedback and a suggested CEFR score in seconds.
Reflect: study the feedback to decide on ways of improving the essay by eliminating common learner errors.
Revise and resubmit the essay as many times as you like to see your progress and raise your score.
Improve your writing with Write & Improve. It’s Free!
Write & Improve Technology
The challenges for this tool are:
Accurate grades and effective and detailed feedback
Grade with high correlation to human examiners
Provide pedagogically useful feedback like human teachers
Research & Development
You can find out more about the research and development behind Write & Improve, together with the current developments that are taking place here. This sets out the robust basis for the automated assessment and annotation. It also identifies the published research available to document the approach.
Design Principles
Once you have used Write & Improve you will realise that it is not a grammar and spelling checker which sometimes returns random results. It does not mark up every error, and it does not self-correct your work. These reflect two key principles behind the tool.
Write & Improve’s approach to error identification and correction is two-fold. It is designed not to give too much ‘red pen’ feedback in one go as this can be ultimately demotivating and counter-productive. It incrementally supports the learner as they review and resubmit their work to improve their writing.
It returns feedback on common errors, where there is a very high level of confidence in the diagnosis. It cannot identify every error, although more and more errors are being detected and added to the engine.