sCoolWork Releases World's First Free Editor to ‎Automatically Support Academic Styles ‎

May 17, 2012 - PRLog -- Known to many students around the world, and to an increasing number of U.S. secondary ‎and higher education students, academic formatting styles are sets of rules made to ‎ensure uniformity in academic papers. The three major academic formatting styles are ‎MLA (a style created by the Modern Language Association of America), APA (‎created by ‎the‎ American Psychological Association) and Chicago/Turabian (by the University of ‎Chicago Press). ‎

sCoolWork, an innovative homework help web application, has just released the world's ‎first free document editor to fully and automatically support all three major academic ‎formatting styles (MLA, APA and Chicago/Turabian)‎, in addition to free style editing. By ‎making manual academic formatting a thing of the past, sCoolWork's editor is to ‎significantly decrease homework preparation time while increasing the overall homework ‎quality.‎ ‎

This unique editor was the first development to come out of "sCoolWork Credit Shopping ‎Spree", a mini-game within the sCoolWork app, encouraging users to spend virtual credits ‎on future roadmap features, and even suggest brand new ones.‎
‎"We were unsure if our roadmap actually matched what our users had in mind when they ‎thought of the direction 'sCoolWork' is heading", says Shachar Tal, the Israeli-born VP ‎Marketing of sCoolWork, "…so we thought: 'why not give them some virtual credit to 'buy' ‎whatever feature they want for sCoolWork? When the dust settled, it turned out that ‎most of our users chose to 'buy' an MLA/APA/Chicago compliant editor. Apparently there ‎is no such editor in the market today, so we gave them what they wanted. They ended up ‎‎'buying' an actual thing with make belief credit!"‎

It is no wonder sCoolWork users chose Academic Formatting Support as #1 in their ‎requested features list. Several focus groups done internally at Skills & Knowledge ltd., ‎sCoolWork's developer, indicated the same. This research, done with U.S. high school and ‎college students, clearly pointed out students' unhappiness from the very rigid and ‎demanding formatting styles, taking valuable time and being a source of frustration and ‎unnecessary lower grading. One student even referred the researchers to an online video, ‎with a long and complex step by step explanation on accurate formatting using known ‎document editors. Following the steps of that video takes at least an hour for a medium ‎sized essay, wherein the student has to reformat complete paragraphs, define in-line and ‎between-line spacing, format headings and use a very complex and time consuming ‎pattern for citing, reference and bibliography.‎

In sCoolWork's editor, these are all gone now, saving the user hours and making sure no ‎mistakes are done in the process, and no grade is lowered as a result.‎

Based on additional user feedback from the "sCoolWork Credit Shopping Spree", ‎sCoolWork developers are currently working or releasing a better grammar checker, as a ‎unique partnership with one the leading internet grammar checking services provider. ‎More features are planned, all based on the most purchased "Shopping Spree" features.‎

sCoolWork is a complete all-in-one homework preparation tool integrating a powerful text ‎editor, a specialized search system and a rich set of additional services. This unique ‎approach allows for three main user benefits: Decrease homework preparation time, ‎improve students' grades and develop their learning skills. ‎

sCoolWork is developed by Skills & Knowledge Ltd. (S&K), a new start-up company from ‎Israel's Silicon Valley. Founded in 2011, S&K provides software tools for researching and ‎creating papers for both students and information workers in a way which is optimized to ‎save the users' time and improve the overall quality of the document.‎

S&K's solutions not only help users to prepare papers, but they also truly improve their ‎skills, e.g. by explaining the right techniques of work sequence, material seeking and ‎processing. Thus, the more one uses S&K's software tools, the more his or her work will be ‎effective.‎

Skills and Knowledge is headed by Mr. Alexander Dayan. ‎

sCoolWork can be found @ scoolwork.com ‎

Shachar Tal, May 2012, Shachar@skills-and-knowledge.com ,reprint permitted