Tech Toolbox

Writing is a lot like do-it-yourself home improvement projects. It’s a lot harder than it looks.

In the not so distant past, busy executives had secretaries and personal assistants to type—and correct—their hurriedly written prose. But now everyone is pretty much on his own, free to send an on-the-run email to the most important client without even a cursory spell check.

So does it really matter that he wrote bread when he meant breadth—or used 500 words to say what could have been more effectively written with 200? Yes…it does.

Start-up Gramlee claims it has a solution: web-based while you wait editing, In fairness, it may be more like while you sleep editing, because it can take up to 24 hours for the company to transform your tenuous text to polished prose. It costs about a dollar to edit an average email, $10 for a six-page double-spaced report, $50 for a 35-page white paper.