This disorder not only lowers self-esteem but also affects school and work performance. For instance, an email with grammar mistakes can scare off 25% of potential leads.

AI-based writing assistant Linguix can make the impact of the disability less damaging. To better understand what struggles dyslexics face and how Linguix helps these users, we have conducted a survey. Here’s what we have found.

Methodology

To compile the report, we studied data from 3543 dyslexic subscribers of our email newsletter. We asked a number of questions regarding psychological and work-related issues these users experience while communicating online or performing writing tasks. 

Finally, our team analyzed how dyslexic users benefit from Linguix tools and what particular features they enjoy the most. 

Key Takeaways

Types of online communications

First, the dyslexic respondents were asked what issues they have when communicating online:

It turned out that dyslexics struggle a lot when writing emails. Due to the condition, people with dyslexia may confuse letters that look similar or put them the wrong way around. 

As a result, many emails are sent with typos and incorrect spelling. No prizes for guessing what dyslexics feel when this happens: anxiety and shame to name a few. Respondents confirmed that they feel worried about sending a business letter with a typo:

❝ Yes, I’m far from illiterate but I get busy and I make errors when I rush over a task.❞

❝Yes in a previous job I was posting for veterans or memorial day and I typed ‘soilder’ instead of soldier  I did not notice. My boss called me upset because he had people messaging him about the error.  I was mortified.❞

❝ Yes, I’m worried I’ll come off less professional because my grammar or spelling is improper.❞

The importance of grammar

We also found out whether respondents believe that grammar is important in their communications with colleagues. 86.7% of them think that it’s the first indicator of your intelligence and professionalism:

❝ I don’t know about other colleagues’ opinions, but I know it feels a lot less professional when grammar is incorrect. I tend to rely on my checkers to catch stupid errors and sound professional, even when I’m being personal.❞

❝ Very important. People view grammar as a direct indication of where you are intellectually. No one wants a representative of a company who looks uneducated.❞

❝ I personally find grammar to be extremely important, especially since the majority of the time the tone of voice isn’t obvious. The period when I use proper grammar helps me to deliver the proper tone with my message.❞

How dyslexia symptoms may affect career

On top of that, we asked if they made noticeable mistakes due to their disorder and how it affected their career. For example, our PR director once typed “butt” instead of “but” in business correspondence. Luckily, her addressee had a great sense of humor and this inoffensive typo just made him laugh. Dyslexic users are no exception, 92.3% are worried about their career:

❝YES! I had a few times before Linguix that I made some pretty bad mistakes. Once, I talked about a ‘pubic’ facing API. Another time, I misspelled a senior VP’s name (Ash -> Ass). I got an email from IT immediately about the ‘bad word’ filter, as well as the embarrassment about the VP’s name. After that, I started to take extra time to reread all my emails out loud or use text to speech. With something like Linguix, I have a slightly better chance of catching it quickly.❞

❝Yes! Absolutely I worry about that often.❞

How Linguix Helps Dyslexic Users

In the end, our team analyzed what Linguix tools dyslexic users find the most helpful.

As previously mentioned, dyslexics make lots of typos due to their condition, therefore it’s apparent that the grammar checker is the most valuable feature for them (almost 90% of answers!). 

Nevertheless, Paraphraser and Shortcuts are used a lot as well — 55% and 37% of dyslexics respectively believe they’re helpful. Less typing — fewer typos! 

Besides, thousands of businesses worldwide use Linguix Style Guides — a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of documents. This feature ensures that employees use correct brand and product names.

Free Premium for Dyslexic Users

Our survey has proven that AI writing assistants became a necessity for dyslexic users.

After a thorough analysis of their needs, our team decided to provide all dyslexic users with Linguix Premium free of charge for 3 months. To get your Premium plan, click the link and enjoy your error-free copies, messages and emails. 

Hope you find it helpful!

The post Writing Difficulties Dyslexics Face and how Linguix can Help: a New Survey by Linguix appeared first on Linguix Blog.

• You can deeply focus on your thoughts and the value you provide while writing. Without the rewriter, you’d be interrupted with your own thoughts about more suitable synonyms or ways to enhance your copy.

• You spend less time editing because the rewriter helps you make your sentences clear and nativelike as you type.

• AI and machine learning are now able to create amazing content that is indistinguishable from human one. There are even articles written by robots! The rewriter is no exception.

Technology doesn’t stand still and neither does Linguix. The updated rewriter has shown significant and measurable improvements. Let’s discuss how our team has achieved these results and define various metrics that have helped us to provide a more sophisticated experience in Linguix Rewriter 2.0.

Metrics to Determine the Quality of Linguix Rewriter

The Bleu Score. The Bilingual Evaluation Understudy score, or BLEU for short, is a metric for comparing a generated sentence to a reference sentence. This metric evaluates the quality of the machine learning translation.

In fact, the closer the value to 0, the better. It implies that the rewriter generates “smarter” results, and chooses synonyms that retain initial meaning. 

The Jaccard similarity coefficient is a measure used in understanding the similarities between sample sets. As with the BLEU score, the appropriate Jaccard Index value tends to 0. Again, the closer to 0, the better the results.

Language-Agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding (LaBSE) and Cosine similarity. 

The LaBSE model encodes text into high dimensional vectors so that the text vectors close in meaning are geometrically close to each other (they’re placed into a shared multi-dimensional vector space).

Cosine similarity, in turn, helps to define how similar the pieces of text are. It measures the cosine of the angle between two vectors projected in this space. The closer the cosine value to 1, the smaller the angle and the greater the match between vectors.

Perplexity. Perplexity is a metric used to evaluate how good a language model is. The lower the perplexity score is, the better the language model works in terms of word prediction. 

How We Conducted the Training

We took 11 datasets with 573,228,310 million sentences in various styles (from technical documentation to fiction) and trained our model. The goal was to make it able to handle texts of different types and styles. The one-to-one/one-to-many column represents whether the source sentence has one paraphrase option or several.

The Results

The quantitative analysis of our new model represents a higher quality of the paraphrasing generation compared to the previous model. The new model outperforms the old one in terms of text similarity: 

The BLEU score: 0.47↓ vs 0.65

The Jaccard similarity coefficient: 0.45↓ vs 0.51 

Perplexity. Rewrites generated by Linguix rewriter 2.0 appeared to be more natural and native: 0.26↓ vs 4.99

The semantic similarity value of the new model is slightly lower than that of the previous model (0.80↓ vs 0.93), which is totally fine. The model generates a variety of options using other words but keeping the meaning of the source text as its target.

As such, for Linguix rewriter 2.0 we were able to improve the quality of the rephrased content while keeping the text meaning at the same level.

How to test the updated rewriter 

You need to install Linguix browser extension or use Linguix web editor.

The post How To Measure the Quality of the AI-based Rewriter: Our Experience appeared first on Linguix Blog.

As a result, typos or grammar mistakes often go unnoticed. And this problem has seemingly become a daunting one in corporate communications—there’re even lists of commonly misspelled words. 

But the main question is: do typos in correspondence really affect your business?  

According to Linguix’s fresh research, the answer is: yes, they do. Read on to learn how exactly and what you can do to minimize the negative effects.

Methodology

We have conducted a survey among 50,000 subscribers of our email newsletter. The respondents mostly hold sales, marketing, IT, and management positions. 

In our survey, we asked a number of questions concerning people’s reactions to grammar mistakes and typos in the email subject line as well as in its main text, and whether they would like to continue doing business with a person who makes such mistakes.

Key takeaways

First, we wanted to figure out how mistakes or typos in the subject line affect the email open rate. It turned out that most respondents (75.4%) will still open such an email. However, a significant part (24.6%) consider an erroneous title a sound reason not to read the email. 

Then, we asked the respondents if they usually reply to emails containing grammar mistakes and/or typos. The majority (73.7%) said they do, but there was also a large portion of those who don’t (26.3%.) This means each time your employee sends a message with grammar mistakes, almost a quarter of potential leads are cut off straight away. Quite a bit!

Another important question we posed was whether our subscribers would even do business with a person who sends them emails with grammar mistakes. And while 46.6% of the respondents didn’t consider this to be a problem, the majority of 53.4% were negative about the possibility of further cooperation. 

Quick tips

As we can see, the issue of grammar mistakes in email correspondence is serious enough to hamper your business development. What can be done to improve the situation?

• Finding additional time for employees to review emails before sending them. In some cases, this will entail a reduced number of emails sent per day; however, in the long run, more qualitative messages might yield better results than the mere quantitative approach.
• Using email templates can help avoid mistakes in the subject line. But then, it’s crucial to make sure the template is 100% correct, otherwise, the mistake will be multiplied many times before it’s finally noticed. 
• Adopting a writing assistant solution like Linguix can help dramatically reduce the number of typos and grammar mistakes: it takes just a few moments for an employee to correct them based on suggestions. Besides, such assistants are also capable of eliminating the language barrier when it comes to internal communications. 
• Introducing a corporate style guide can both decrease the number of mistakes and help maintain the optimal tone of voice, which is another important factor in brand communication. 

Email communication is one of the primary sales and marketing channels for many companies, and given the high price of typos and grammar mistakes, this issue is really worth addressing! 

The post How Grammar Mistakes Affect Email Communication: a New Survey appeared first on Linguix Blog.