Writers Guild

Inspiration

We realized that students are often frustrated with the lack of resources during their high school journey. There's often a lot of resources for STEM and other art-related endeavors, however very little for creative writing, given it is more of a niche. In addition, we recognize literacy is a key skill and a key measure of a population’s education. Being able to read and write opens up the world of education and knowledge. However, this literacy gap has been exacerbated given the pandemic impacts and the lack of effective online schooling. We understand this is a pressing issue, which is why we aim to educate learning English-writers and developing writers about literacy, while making writing a more enjoyable experience overall.

What it does

Our project is split into four sections: The Home page, Text Editor, Text Summarizer, and Writing Tips page. The Home page features our general branding and aesthetics, as well as our mission. Our special Text Editor will display fancy yet satisfying effects and sounds while the user is typing to encourage them to work harder. It also has light effects, to keep you excited and energized, and adjustable font sizes for readability. The Text Information button displays word count and keeps track of errors the user corrected. This can help users improve their spelling in the future for typing and writing. Next, the Text Summarizer uses natural advanced language techniques to generate a new shorter text that conveys the most critical information from the original text. This helps advanced writers save time, and developing ones to become literate because we summarize the complex text for them! Lastly, the Writing Tips page provides general writing advice, in a succinct and easy-to-read method.

How we built it

We designed our website with CSS and HTML. We used Javascript for most interactive functions in the Text Editor. For the Text Summarizer, we used Python and abstractive summarization, by selecting words based on semantic understanding and producing important material in a new way. It approaches the weights of important parts of sentences, looks at certain words, and further ranks it based on importance and similarly among each other.

Challenges we ran into

We had some trouble with the navigation bar, and actually used a -10px top margin at the start for the header, which we knew would be troublesome. Luckily, after some troubleshooting and google searches, we realized the body function had default parameters and were able to fix it. We also had some general issues with text and image formatting, but it was fixed by spending time to adjust the CSS properties for each element.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to create a nice navigation bar and design a fully functioning website, which was really fulfilling. In addition, we were able to add special effects to our text editor and even make a complementary text summarizer along with it, in the short time we had!

What we learned

As this is our first/second hackathon, almost everything we created has been a learning experience. We learned specific CSS styling features, how to create a navigation bar, adding special effects, changing font size (by targeting in Javascript), how to create a basic text editor and summarizer, how to add a footer, and more about literacy in general!

What's next for Writers Guild

For future iterations, we aim to add more writing tips in the section, with different subpages such as literacy magazines or writing competitions high-schoolers could participate in. We are always expanding opportunities for our youth, as we think it is essential to improve their writing journey. In addition, we had some trouble with the text editor, and we aim to improve the functionality by making it more susceptible when detecting errors and more user-friendly to use. For example, we could add custom fonts, colour and some buttons with basic functionalities such as saving and printing. Finally, we want to incorporate the text summarizer actually into the page, instead of linking it.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• python
• replit