Macmillan Learning Pairs Smart Search with Microsoft Word for Writing Students

[kate_geraghty]

New Integration to Provide More Seamless Support for Writers,

in College and Beyond

Macmillan Learning today announced the development of new, integrated writing support within Microsoft Word with their leading online product, Writer’s Help. Powered by Writer's Help, this smart search APP is seamlessly integrated in Microsoft Word, designed to respond to common student questions about writing. Writer's Help Now will give all writers, in college and beyond, quick, reliable answers at just the point when they need them. Providing writers with a resource that allows them to search quickly and get accurate, targeted answers within the writing space so many college students use will help them stay focused and build confidence as they work.

“Writing is a skill students learn and continue to hone throughout their college courses,” said Macmillan Learning CEO Ken Michaels. “Educators repeatedly bemoan the common mistake students make when they use unvetted help from the web. By harnessing the best research from our authors to inform a much smarter search, we are offering students just-in-time help while they write. By integrating within Word, students don’t have to leave the application to get that support.”

“Students aren’t necessarily searching for words like ‘ellipses’ or ‘transitions’ when they have questions. Typically, they are more likely to search instead for ‘three dots’ or ‘flow’,” explained Managing Director Susan Winslow. “Writer’s Help was built on the idea of giving students information exactly when they need it, with the search words they actually use.”

Macmillan Learning’s team compiled research, gathering the words that students actually use to search for help in their writing so that the answers and results would be grouped into small, smart, useful categories.  “Students are often intimidated by writing and simply turn to search engines for answers,” commented Macmillan Learning Publisher, Leasa Burton. “Instead of getting vast or inaccurate results, Writer’s Help provides targeted, relevant advice.  It is a process our editors work on continuously so that we can provide the best  experience for students.”

Already in use at more than 500 colleges and universities across the country, Writer’s Help combines content and tools from the most widely used classroom resources available, all from the leading publisher in writing handbooks, Macmillan imprint Bedford/St. Martin’s, including the best-selling textbook in recent history, A Writer’s Reference by Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers.

“All writers benefit from seeing a good model,” notes Writer’s Help coauthor Stephen A. Bernhardt. “Writer’s Help provides some one hundred models of various genres—lab reports, literature reviews, business memos, research papers, multimodal compositions, reflective papers, critical analyses, and many more text types. The model documents all provide excellent examples of well-formatted text to help students to learn.”

Writer’s Help Now, with enhanced search for multilingual writers, will be available in 2017.