Embodied Revision in Writing

Designed a web application (Polly) that allows students to learn effective + accurate punctuation practices by speaking aloud (using rhetorical grammar and prosodic cues).

Problem Space

EdTech, Desktop Web Design

Tools

White Paper Research, User Survey, Competitive Analysis, Usability Testing, Figma, Python, Streamlit.

Collaborators

2 Advisors (Dr. Yukang Yan, Dr. Deborah Rossen-Knill)
2 UX Designers
1 Back-end Developer
1 Front-end Developer

Duration

3 weeks (2024)

The Issue

For the last decade, punctuation misuse has consistently ranked top #20 most common issues in college students' writing (Lunsford & Lunsford 2008).

"Because there's a lot of grammar rules, it gets confusing."

-- university student, user survey response

You are a university student. You believe that correctly and effectively using punctuation means you need to memorize grammar rules. But rules are plenty, so punctuation feels unintuitive. You're discouraged from revising your writing at all, preferring to delegate this task to AI tools.

“I rely too much on auto-correct features and ChatGPT.”

-- university student, user survey response

But these tools don't help you learn: Grammarly, Google Docs, or ChatGPT simply correct your writing or cite rules (agh!) to explain their corrections. You rarely understand why the change is better.

The Opportunity

But... punctuation is just a matter of grammar rules, right? Not quite!

The punctuation of a ‘good’ writer is meaning-dependent, not grammar-dependent.

-- Dawkins (1995)

Students want to revise independently and meaningfully, but lack tools that support that kind of learning. An intuitive tool for practicing revision can empower students to revise their writing without being overburdened by grammar rules.

Furthermore, this meaning-dependent revision process can be made embodied.

The Solution

Polly helps users revise writing by illustrating the connection between intonation, punctuation, and information units through a 3-step revision process, rooted in meaning-based grammar.
Step 1: Read Aloud

User reads (performs) their sentence aloud.

Step 2: Review Intonation Graph

Polly generates a graph of the user's intonation pattern. User reviews significant changes in intonation, which denote potential information unit boundaries.

Step 3: Revise & Repunctuate

Polly guides users to revise their sentence using meaning-based grammar, with their intonation pattern as cues.

// Polly's approach to revision and grammar is informed by extensive literature review and SME interviews that are not captured on this site - contact me for full project details :-)

My Contribution

Design Impact

  • Led 5+ UX Reviews to guide the team through 5 iterations to arrive at fully functional MVP.
  • Owned the interactive learning flow in close collaboration with Prof. Rossen-Knill (Subject Matter Expert).

Research Impact

  • Conducted 10+ user research sessions, including user surveys, user interviews, usability tests, and white paper research.
  • Designed the evaluation experiment to assess the application’s effectiveness in learning.

Outcome

Using our MVP, we conducted a within-subject experiment with 9 participants (university students in Rochester, a range of class years and years of instruction in English). We measure success based on punctuation accuracy and confidence compared to baseline (prior to using Polly).

After using Polly, participants are able to identify more punctuation issues (+26%) and of more types; all attempts to revise issues are correct (+25%). Participants revising more than 4 sentences using Polly showed the clearest improvement.

After using Polly, participants are more confident about identifying and correcting punctuation issues (self-rated 3.9/5, +0.5).

Polly encourages participants to develop concrete strategies to identify punctuation issues. Before using Polly, 5/9 participants expressed reliance on “intuition” and 4/9 on grammar rules. After using Polly, 7/9 participants read aloud to revise sentences, integrating speech patterns with punctuation placement for all punctuations.

“I used to only read aloud very complicated texts, but it helps with revising.”

—D. A, '24 (Participant)

“Incorporating more vocal patterns made revising easier.”

—N. M., '25 (Participant)

While not statistically significant, Polly demonstrates promising results.

// contact me for full project details

If I had more time...

I would like to enhance Polly's voice recording capabilities by adopting a baseline approach, where users establish a baseline speech profile by recording a sample. This baseline would then inform the analysis of subsequent recordings, ensuring personalized and accurate feedback tailored to each user's natural speech patterns.

I would also like to conduct longitudinal testing to assess whether Polly effectively supports and sustains the desired writing behaviors over time.

What I learnt :-)

  • Experiment design. In contrast to projects that focus on evaluating the UI's effectiveness, this project involved testing our tool for its ability to encourage target user behaviors. This required a more comprehensive approach to test design. I took care to make sure that the control conditions were met, and our test participants were diverse to avoid biases.
  • Working in a cross-functional team. Leading a team of 2 and collaborating with developers requires proactive task delegation and communication. I ensure that changes to design are communicated across all areas of development. This helps us manage the dependencies between design, back-end functionality, and user experience.

    For instance, at first, we assumed that pauses were a meaningful feature in determining punctuation. When my research revealed this to not be the case, I worked closely with our back-end developer to revise our approach. We ultimately chose and customized different speech-to-text and intonation visualization packages to better support our goals.
  • Applying academic theories to real-life applications. As a tutor and an ESL student myself, I am passionate about empowering writers to produce texts that express themselves more effectively. It was a deeply inspiring and rewarding process to apply abstract concepts such as information units, the prosody of spoken and written language, and punctuation norms to address an unmet need in teaching and learning punctuation. It pushed me to think creatively, from identifying our problem space to evaluating how principles of rhetorical grammar could be applied in a practical way. 

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