Textoic

Inspiration

Writing well, from anything from a short blogpost to a long novel, is essentially about editing. You have to rewrite wonky sentences, use shorter structures to make ideas clearer and rephrase a lot of stuff.

While there are many automatic tools that help with the editing process, but they usually:

1. Find too many problems in the text, which makes them annoying. Specially when they are false positives.
2. Are very opinionated and try to enforce a particular style.
3. Only care about being grammatically correct, which may help students but not proficient English writers.

In the case of Forge, we saw that there were no native automatic text editors, so we decided to make an integration with specific rules that works well for teams collaborating on editing.

What it does

Textoic simplifies the editing process, makes your writing more persuasive and helps you enforce a common style across a Confluence space. Implemented as a content action, it will find problems in the Confluence page you choose and offer suggestions for how to fix them.

Although not a comprehensive list of what Textoic can do, here are some examples of problems and their suggestions:

1. Explained words: Sometimes our writing is not very concise and we use explanations like saying "He became aware" instead of the much shorter and equivalent "He realized". In a similar way, "not true" is actually "false" and "very afraid" is just "terrified".
2. Inelegant variations: Some words and phrases are rarer variants of more common words. Common words make reading your content easier and more accessible. Textoic will offer you to replace "whilst" with "while" and "in the event that" with "if".
3. Passive sentences: Passive sentences are harder to process mentally than active sentences, which is why Textoic will automatically rewrite them into the active. For example "Our systems are carefully evaluated by experts" would become "Experts carefully evaluate our systems."
4. Hedging and personal opinions: A text that aims to persuade has no place for doubt. Textoic identifies hesitating language like "rather" in "rather beautiful" or "in my humble opinion".
5. Profanities and slurs: Certain words are brand risks. Our profanities and slurs rules are simply safety checks to make sure no inappropriate language slips into one of your pages.

If you don't like a suggestion, you can ignore it and Textoic will not mark it as a problem for that phrase again. You can further customize Textoic to your needs on each Confluence Space by disabling rules you don't like and manually editing the Ignored problems.

On the settings page, you can also choose an English dialect and Textoic will automatically detect words in other dialects as problems. For example, if you want to produce texts in American English, Textoic will flag all instances of "colour" and suggest "color" as a replacement, ensuring your texts always have a consistent dialect, whichever you want to use.

How we built it

• Atlassian Forge UI kit for the UI
• AWS API Gateway + AWS Lambda for the backend infrastructure
• Our own Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to find problems in the text

Challenges we ran into

The main roadblock was not being able to fully integrate with the text authoring workflow, since Forge doesn't provide a module that would let us show and fix the style problems directly in Confluence's text editor and provide the optimal user experience. Instead, we decided to make a Confluence content action to show and fix style problems, and we are happy with the result. But the overall user experience would improve if the writer could see the problems in the editor instead of having to publish the content first.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to adapt to Forge not just by implementing an integration with their platform, but also by designing new features explicitly targeted to improving collaboration. Since Confluence is a good fit for engineers writing documentations, we also implemented rules following the FAA's Writing guidelines (https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/plain_language/), aimed at engineers and technical writers.

What we learned

We learned how to build Atlassian Forge apps using the Forge UI kit.

What's next for Textoic

We plan on extending our rules based on user feedback and publish it on the Atlassian marketplace. We also would like to integrate the UI more deeply with Confluence's text editor, if in the future Forge provides UI components to do so.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• forge-ui-kit
• node.js