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Communication through written language is by far the most commonly used communication channel. The ubiquity of computing devices has made authoring very easy—email, blogs and wikis are only some examples—and document production is at a higher rate than ever. Most of the authoring, by a large margin, is in English and by non-native speakers. Nonetheless, the only tool available to authors today is a text processor. Namely, writers merely use a typewriter with memory, equipped with 30-year old technology of automatic spell checking against a dictionary. Current authoring platforms offer minimal guidance with regard to the "correctness" of a document: context sensitive mistakes, word selection and usage, sentence structure and readability, use of connectives, and so forth.
We suggest that current natural language processing technologies allow us to develop a tool that can actually help writers—including native speakers of English, non-native speakers, and writers with disabilities (e.g., dyslectics)—to produce better, professional-looking English documents, email messages, and reports. We are developing an authoring assistance tool that is capable of identifying and correcting grammatical mistakes and context sensitive word usage mistakes (it’s—its, in—it; number—amount); guiding writers to select appropriate prepositions and determiners; enhancing written language by proposing appropriate adjectives and adverbs; and providing guidance for structuring a document.