DESCRIPTION
Write & Improve is a free service from Cambridge English for learners to practise their written English. Submit your written work and receive feedback in seconds, covering spelling, vocabulary, grammar and general style. There are a number of free writing tasks at Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced level, as well as an IELTS workbook. You can create a profile to see many more tasks.
COMMENTS
Automatic correction of written work sounds like a teacher's dream, so I decided to test the site. The task I chose was to write a postcard to a friend about a holiday. Of course, I made some deliberate mistakes (click here for a larger image).
In fact, the feedback you get is in two stages. First, any text where there's a mistake is highlighted. You then have to make changes and resubmit your text. After that, you get the final feedback as above. As you can see, the mistakes I corrected myself (I'd put "at London" and "See you latest" in the original text) were confirmed, but the other mistakes ("on holidays" and "I go to visit" instead of "on holiday" and "I'm going to visit") were not identified.
As the results were mixed at Beginner level, I decided to have a go at an Intermediate task. Here's the result (click here for larger image).
As you can see, the feedback is much more detailed, and would certainly be useful for a student working without the aid of a teacher.
VERDICT
Although automatic correction seems to have a way to go before it can totally replace a teacher, this site does allow students to improve their written work. For teachers, there's a wide variety of writing tasks that could be given as homework, self-corrected by the student using the site, and then submitted to the teacher for final correction.
