Behind the scenes at Essay - Write Better. Think Better.

[Music] writing is a navigation tool in some sense you think about where you're going so you can test out the root before you

implement it that's all associated with thought and the deepest form of thought is writing it's the deepest form of thought [Music]

my students in my fourth year seminar were very good students I asked them to write three essays and the first essays were they were terrible

I started to think through when I was assessing an essay well what was I assessing use the correct words

then put them in the proper phrases and then the phrases should be organized into sentences that are grammatically coherent then you have to organize the sentences within each paragraph and then

your paragraphs have to be sequenced so that the essay exists as a coherent and meaningful totality and so then I wrote a guide to writing and just made That

explicit this is what you're doing when you're writing and you have to edit at every single one of those levels when my students in my fourth year seminar went through this process they

inevitably produced the best essay they'd ever written [Music] so I took this writing manual I discussed it a lot with my son and his

team that'll give me one that's more conversationalist between you and me hi I'm Julian Peterson I wouldn't say founder of essay in that situation though

hey I'm Julian I guess I might so we started working on this how long ago now on essay well we really started working on it I think in 2019 you were

very interested in the idea of of creating Educational Tools online and we noticed on your website that the document that you produced for your students had been

downloaded to 150 000 times so I was like okay that's that's an interesting piece of information whenever we had thought about building something based off of this document it

was always kind of like a course idea but what would be really cool is to build something that incorporated all of the tools and philosophical elements of

that process and just build it into the software I do think it's a revolutionary program in some sense because word processing

technology really hasn't changed that much since about 1985.

essays value compared to other word processors is that we offer a more structured writing environment it's a tool that will allow you to get your thoughts down and then make sure that

they're clear and well structured we really want to focus on the writer improving their own ideas [Music] why didn't you decide that working on

this with me was a good idea well I mean part of it was was that I I know that writing is important the impact of writing on oneself it's

the way you organize your own thinking you can lay out what you think what do I think you just watch and you think okay I have a problem what do I think about that I think this I think this I think this but

I think this and I think this I don't know much about that but I'm interested so I better read this now I think this you write all that down just so you know

who you are and then you think okay let's sort this mess out [Music] create your character with your words

you mark your path forward with your thoughts every word matters intonation matters connotation matters poetic Beauty matters and if it doesn't matter

then you're not writing and if you're not writing you're not thinking and if you're not thinking then you're going to fall into a pit that's how serious you are if you think words matter and they matter they matter

more than anything one of the reasons that we believe in this product in essay is to help people learn to work through their ideas before

communicating them University students who are learning to write well-structured arguments people trying to write compelling emails people who struggle with communication generally in their careers if people got in the habit

of editing their writing and their thinking and thinking critically about their own ideas then you know the world would be a much better place

to essay means to attempt to try it's a lovely word to use as the signifier for the program because we're trying to get

people to try amop man aim up and put everything you have behind it foreign

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