Making the Write Connections: Linking Writing Support Tools with Writer Needs

Abstract
This work sheds light on whether and how creative writers' needs are met by existing research and commercial writing support tools (WST). We conducted a needs finding study to gain insights into writers' process during creative writing through a qualitative analysis of response from an online questionnaire and Reddit discussions on r/Writing. Using a systematic analysis of 115 tools and 66 research papers, we map out the landscape of how digital tools facilitate the writing process. Our triangulation of data reveals that research predominantly focuses on the writing activity and overlooks pre-writing activities and the importance of visualization. We distill 10 key takeaways to inform future research on WST and point to opportunities surrounding underexplored areas. Our work offers a holistic and up-to-date account of how tools have transformed the writing process, guiding the design of future tools that address writers' evolving and unmet needs.
We obtained data from three separate sources:
With these three data sources, we've created two interactive visualizations. Select one of the tabs above to explore the visualizations!

Visualization of the literature annotated using our data schema sorted by year.
HINT: You can click on the text to learn more about each paper.

Abstract

Visualization of commercial tools mentioned by writers in our online questionnaire and on Reddit. Each tool was annotated using our data schema sorted in descending order by number of times mentioned.
HINT: You can click on the text to learn more about each paper.

Visualization of commercial tools mentioned by writers in our online questionnaire and on Reddit. Each tool was annotated using our data schema and grouped by how writers use the tool. The size of each section is correlated to the number of times tools were mentioned.
HINT: You can click on the colored slices to zoom in and click in the center to zoom out.