Efficiency, Content, and Style Software Tool 

The ECoS is an affordable tool for efficient manuscript preparation and review.

It was designed for researchers and professors in higher education institutions.

Problem

Manuscript and report writing is critical to academia and the life sciences, especially for the funding, design, development, implementation, and reporting of innovative technologies and life-affirming scientific research.

However, it is extraordinarily difficult to teach best writing practices to newer personnel. 

Newer writers are generally unaware of the deep and complex expectations behind their field’s professional writing, especially for manuscripts aimed at meeting the politics and acceptability of institutional review boards (IRB), government institutions, commercial industries, and funding agencies.

There is a clear need for a software tool that would alleviate four significant obstacles (in terms of acceptance rates) to the creation of successful technical documentation: personnel inexperience, time inefficiency, unclear expectations, and task delegation. 

Manuscript and report writing is critical to academia - especially for the funding, designing, development, implementation, and reporting of innovative engineering projects, technologies, and research. 

However, it is extremely difficult to teach best writing practices to personnel who hate writing (e.,g., personnel in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields). 

Newer writers are generally unaware of the deep and complex expectations behind their field’s professional writing. 

They often struggle to write manuscripts that meet the politics and acceptability of, for example, publications, institutional review boards (IRB), government institutions, commercial industries, and other funding agencies. 

When professors review an academic paper that they have written in collaboration with other academics and/or students, there are often many styles and formatting issues that are not apparent to those that are newer to the field. 

It often becomes tedious for the reviewer to type out these comments and provide the proper level of detail for how the unfamiliar writer can improve. 

There is a clear need for exciting technical writing solutions that alleviate the following critical obstacles to the creation of successful (e.g., funded, accepted) technical documentation: 

ECoS improves the success of proposal submissions by 40%, with a 60% increase in writing efficiency

Solution

ECoS is our software solution.

The ECoS, based on the best practices of a collaborative technical writing approach, is a MS Word Plug-In used for time-efficient editorial review.

Purpose: Streamlining and optimizing the process of preparing, editing, and publishing a document.

Useful for those who are dealing with it on daily basis, i.e. researchers and professors in higher education institutions.

The ECoS is an affordable tool for efficient manuscript preparation and review:

ECoS emphasizes the 

of your writing. 

Efficiency refers to quickly creating meaningful text. 

Example: Using templates, minimizing repetition, and using automation features (e.g., cross-referencing figures, tables, and equations). 

Content refers to strategies and best practices for constructing actual, strong, persuasive, fundable text, ensuring the text comprehensively meets the expectations of the target audience. 

Example: Writing an abstract that passes the five fundamental rules. Style refers to the visual appearance of the manuscript. 

Style refers to correct definition of typography and readability.

Example: ensuring that fonts in a figure are not too small to read, and that graphical elements look polished, professional, and presentable.

What is ECoS? 

ECoS is a Microsoft Word Add-in (plug-in) that builds into the ribbon of Microsoft Word, so that you can edit while you work. 

After installation a user will be able to quickly add comments to a Word document using the ECoS toolbar. 

We provide a library of basic comments. User can easily add his own custom comments there. 

When, for example, a reviewer sees a title heading that is not in the appropriate format, he can navigate to the ECoS tab, click on the "Title", and find the comment that specifies the issue with the title. 

Besides, the auto-generated comment will provide a link to a corresponded paragraph of a Style Guide (part of ECoS Add-in) that explains what the proper style is.

Findings: the results speak for themselves

Our experience shows that the use of ECoS improves the success of proposal submissions by 40%, with a 60% increase in writing efficiency without any loss of quality (in fact, with improved quality, as indicated by a greater success of proposal acceptance).

Advantages of the Approach

ECoS tool is powerful not only because it supports collaborative efforts among multiple team members, but because it also supports remote editorial writing for teams whose members may not be able to physically meet in the same. 

The ECoS tool ensures that both the team members, as well as their managers/leaders, are drafting and editing their technical documents both in-person and remotely, while providing a way for team members to transfer information among one another efficiently. 

Such streamlined, comprehensive tools targeting technical writing procedures are not currently available on the market, making ECoS a truly innovative platform that will benefit multiple industries. 

There are hundreds of line-by-line commercial syntax solvers that use computer algorithms to fix minor grammatical problems automatically, such as Microsoft Word’s Spell-Check algorithm. These tools are limited in the types of errors that they can solve and are not designed to teach writers how to improve; these syntax solvers also do not check for descriptive requirements in technical writing. 

Ask yourself, how often does a misspelled word become the real and only reason that a manuscript fails? Very rarely are grammatical errors the crux of why a technical document failed on the fundamental level—spelling mistakes are instead indicative of the larger problems that a collaborative writing team may face. 

By focusing on the bigger picture and harder-to-quantify mistakes that newer writers often overlook, ECoS uniquely targets the content, organization, and style of the manuscript, which are the aspects of the writing process that have a high impact on the success rate (e.g., acceptance into a journal or approval for funding) of the manuscript. 

The ECoS tool helps teach and train writers to think critically about the content and organization of the document while they write and edit. 

For example, there are checkpoints in the tool which prompt the writers to check for content consistency and strong logical writing. Another example is that the tool gives descriptions on how to improve or format images and data graphics (e.g., tables, charts, graphs) and their captions. 

Effective visual data display is a critical component of engineering and research applications. 

The ECoS tool provides descriptive examples on the correct and incorrect way to format content in a document, so that team members can not only understand how to improve, but immediately see what is expected of them. No other writing tool on the market informs senior writers and editors of the big picture failure points of a manuscript in an easily digestible format. 

Several levels of software complexity lay on the path to market, from minimum viable product to multi-user, cloud-based suite solutions. The continuing path to improvement is to apply machine-learning algorithms for gradual replacement of the high-level analysis human tasks. 

Potential Customers

This tool was born out of the needs of our own technical writing team in an academic environment, which produces technical documentation daily. 

The customer segmentation for ECoS is:

Our clients are team and department management, as well as leaders who desire a streamlined interactive tool to efficiently organize technical writing in groups. 

ECoS provides many benefits to writers and is easy to install, especially since it is an accessible Add-On tool for Microsoft Word (a software package well-established as the industry standard for many writing projects). 

ECoS can be used in-person during team meetings or remotely; it automatically updates to transfer team member input throughout the technical writing process. 

The knowledge management framework behind ECoS is also applicable to different end-goal results of the users, for example:


Anticipated Value Proposition

The anticipated value proposition is:

References

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