'ChattingCat' makes writing in English better

April Kim, the creator of ChattingCat / Courtesy of ChattingCat

By Jung Min-ho

Writing in English was always challenging ― even for an MBA student at one of the top business schools in the United States.

So April Kim, the creator of ChattingCat, an English sentence correction service, used that for her own benefit while getting her master’s degree in business administration at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

During her one-year program, she posted more than 2,500 requests for sentence correction for her papers before her graduation in 2014. Now, she wants to make it a business.

“I am the founder of ChattingCat and the biggest beneficiary of it,” she said in a recent interview with The Korea Times. “I believe there are more people out there who could and want to benefit from it.”

She launched the company in 2012 as she thought there was a big demand for English-writing corrections.

“I lived in America for six years and worked at a U.S. company for three years, but I was still not confident in my writing,” she said. “Perhaps it had something to do with my perfectionism, but I was always nervous about making mistakes.”

Her concerns made her writing simpler and shorter than she wanted, confining her to writing using limited numbers of words and expressions.

“I only used the expressions that I could find online. So I could not be creative in expressing my thoughts,” she said.

On ChattingCat, people can type English text of up to 700 characters, which will be corrected by native English tutors instantly. And it costs only one dollar.

“People can compare the corrected version with the original text and decide whether to accept it,” she said. “I have learned a lot about natural expressions that native speakers use through this process. The best part of ChattingCat is that it allows people to see how the tutor corrects their writing in real time.”

Yet the service is suitable more for those who want to correct a short piece of writing. It is important to note that it allows only up to 700 characters, not words.

Also, since most of the 500 native tutors are not professional writers who have experience in the media or publication industry, it will be difficult to expect to see major structural changes for long essays or reports.

Still, the service is gaining popularity especially among students and office workers who have to deal with foreign dealers and customers.

So far nearly 100,000 posts have been corrected by 482 tutors.

“My vision is to make the world a place where everyone can express themselves in other languages. It is just English now, but next could be Chinese or anything,” she said.