Annie and I had sold our book, Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences. Well, our agent had sold it. A couple of weeks later, in the blissful early days between signing the contract (easy) and completing the manuscript (hard), I was strolling down the street with hardly a care. Our dead-end block is lined with sycamore trees that form a 30-foot-high bough over the narrow asphalt, so it’s a pretty nice place to set to thinking. And pow! A thought made it all the way into my brain.
“These so-called rules are algorithms. Maybe the book is also an app.” That’s two thoughts. I praised my septuagenarian cranium.
The last time I programmed anything it was 1981 and I needed to get a 5 ¼-inch VisiCalc floppy disc to talk to my Radio Shack computer, which thought in Basic. I remember a command called Poke, which did just that and got snatches of new code inserted into long lines of old code.
I set up a Zoom with an LA couple I know who create augmented reality art works. They bit, and agreed to build a prototype. In a few months we had a good-looking interface, some proof-of-concept success in getting a handful of rules to interact properly, and a great marketing video.
The idea is that you paste a writing passage of your own into the app on your phone or tablet, and it returns a mark-up with suggestions for changes. It doesn’t rewrite or even offer new wording, just points out the weak areas for you to work on, and tells you the rule so you can relearn it or refer back to the book.
This was midyear 2025, and with dismay I watched AI race through puberty and careen into adolescence. What need for an app if anyone could train AI to do the same thing? Having spent all the money I had budgeted, I prepared to bail out.
But just in case, I asked my friend Jon in San Diego whether he might take a look. An expert programmer working a corporate management job, Jon happened to be developing an AI program to take over his own job.
Before continuing, let’s be clear on the boundaries I believe in for working with AI.
1. If you are not a writer and don’t expect to ever become one, go ahead and use AI to write as you wish. You are not my concern.
2. If you care about writing, don’t let AI take over the task. Make your own sentences, and make them better yourself. Writers puzzle out sentences; in doing so they find meaning. If AI solves the puzzle for you, why write?
3. If you are pretty sure of your grammar but know that you’re no expert, go ahead and let Grammarly or the like copyedit a final version. If Grammarly is finding more than one mistake a page, take a break to study syntax or spelling or whatever’s your problem.
4. If you’ve already written a first draft, with a structure and a theme and characters and events in place, it’s OK to ask AI to write an editor’s note for you. It’ll be a humdinger. AI is great for suggestions from 10,000 feet. You’ll eventually have a human book editor, but in the meantime AI can be a great support.
5. And finally, Rule 2 again. If you care about writing, don’t let AI take over the task. Make your own sentences, and make them better.
Let’s now get back to Jon, who unexpectedly is laid off from his nine-to-five job before he can get his bot to take it over. Jon now had time on his hands, and enough of a cushion to dive into my app for a while. My LA friends retired from the project. I told Jon that if he wanted to, he could work on it, but if he didn’t, I was happy to shut it down: “It’s your call. I can’t pay you, and I can’t vouch for the app’s potential. You’re the AI expert. The risk is all yours now.”
As Jon tinkered with the app, he realized that the algorithms only looked simple, as if anyone could get AI to quickly code them. As it turns out, human language is not particularly logical; this is the core of what Noam Chomsky discovered in the late 1950s, changing the study of linguistics forever. Some of our app’s algorithms would require multiple AI platforms and weeks and months of training the AI platforms to reduce false positives and negatives. The degree of difficulty in getting the app to work was convincing Jon that it had a future.
Jon, by the way, had readily agreed to my requirement that the app remain pedagogically sound. It would reinforce the rules, but wouldn’t rewrite. Our first idea for a marketing slogan was, “It’s a teacher, not a cheater.” The Good Writing app would offer real-time reinforcement of good writing habits, even to the point that teachers using the Good Writing book in class could support the app’s use. I didn’t have to explain the boundaries to Jon. His wife is a writer, and he knew what was good for the marriage. “My friends are nice people who hate all writing apps,” she said with her arms crossed. “You better not piss them off.”
Sooner than I expected, Jon had a beta version of the app out to a number of volunteer writers for testing. The feedback was more than encouraging. People were using it. Some leaned into it, feeding it multiple writing projects and learning along the way.
“I love that it gooses the writer to do better without providing exact suggestions,” beta tester Tracey T. wrote to Jon. “This is AI at its best – assisting without taking away the writer’s voice.”
It’s always kind of amazing to an author that people actually read the book and dumbfounding when they praise it. Double that surprise for an app that seemed obsolete before it was launched. I remain slightly flabbergasted that it’s actually out there. Hey, it was a stray thought of mine on a walk in the neighborhood, a small notion.
Today is the launch of the complete version. If you click below, you’ll get a free trial of a lite version. And if you already own a copy of Good Writing the book, you can retrieve two months free of the full app capabilities. Don’t thank me. I get a little credit for having the original idea, but Jon gets much more credit for believing in it and persisting until this day arrived.
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