How editing with InstaText improves both your writing and cognitive skills

Does the idea of editing your texts and improving your English skills at the same time sound good to you? Well, with InstaText you can do that and more.

InstaText is an advanced editing assistant that improves your text in terms of clarity, readability, conciseness, grammar, spelling and more by providing you with suggestions that you can easily view and track.

And although you can accept or reject all the suggested changes at once, we strongly recommend that you pay attention to the suggestions and accept or reject them one by one if you want to invest in improving your English language skills.

The fact that you can view and track changes and interactively edit your work is one of InstaText’s biggest advantages over many generative AI tools like ChatGPT in the context of editing.

Let us explain this in more detail.

The value of interactive feedback

InstaText uses advanced language technologies, but not generative AI. This means that InstaText does not create content from scratch, but merely analyzes, processes, and improves the text you enter.

In other words: when you ask ChatGPT to edit your text, it writes a new version of it, without showing you the suggested changes individually. There’s no interactivity of feedback, meaning that you cannot accept or reject the suggestions.

Of course, you can ask it to explain the changes or tell you what parts have been changed, but that is time-consuming and doesn’t engage your brain as much as InstaText’s editing style, which is an important aspect of learning. The explanations could also be long and overwhelming and distract you from the editing process.

InstaText, on the other hand, allows you to fully engage in editing and learning at the same time. It shows you every single change without explaining the edits or overwhelming you with multiple suggestions for each word. All this increases your chances of staying focused both on the editing process and on improving your language skills.

InstaText also has a specific limit on the number of characters you can enter, both for the web-based editor and for the browser extension. This way, you can focus on smaller sections of your text if it is long, encouraging you to edit your work thoughtfully and systematically. The shorter the text you enter, the more you can focus on learning from the changes.

With this hands-on approach, you not only improve your current work, but also build up your skills as a writer in the long term. This makes InstaText an ideal tool for professionals, academics, students and anyone who wants to improve their writing skills, whether they are native speakers or not.

‘Writing as a thinking tool’

While it’s great to improve your writing skills, we’re not talking about improving those skills just for the sake of it.

Writing proficiency can obviously have a positive impact on your academic performance and career prospects, but there is also extensive research showing direct and indirect links between writing and the development of cognitive skills. This means that consciously improving your writing skills has benefits that extend to other areas as well.

In an article entitled “Writing as a thinking tool,” Metropolitan State University of Denver describes writing as “an invaluable tool for exercising our cognitive faculties.”

Drawing on the work of several researchers, it provides insights into how being actively involved in the act of writing can lead to the development of mental abilities in areas such as memory, critical thinking, creativity, verbal skills, and overall health.

Here are some of the highlights:

Writing and memory

Writing can help improve memory by creating a deeper connection to the subject matter on a neurological level.

Writing and critical thinking

Writing enables a deeper engagement with the subject matter. Critical thinking goes beyond the mere storage and retrieval of data and requires analysis, reflection, evaluation, creativity, and careful reasoning.

Writing and creativity

Research suggests that writing has some measurable impact on creativity. Researchers also point to the idea that the more creative activities we engage in, the more creative we become.

Writing and verbal skills

Writing expands our lexical competence. When we are challenged to express ideas more clearly or creatively, we push the boundaries of our usual jargon and explore new ways of communicating.

Writing and health

It has long been known in medicine that writing can have a positive influence on health. Writing has been shown to reduce stress, help people cope with trauma, and even correlate with fewer negative physiological symptoms. Writing can also help alleviate anxiety and improve mood.

Is it time to rethink our use of generative AI?

In view of these findings, it is perhaps better to rethink our use of generative AI tools that write for us, rather than activating our own critical thinking and creativity. If we rely too much on tools that generate content, we run the risk of diminishing the cognitive benefits that come from actively engaging in writing and similar problem-solving processes ourselves.

Beyond originality and authorship values, there is indeed merit in writing a piece ourselves and using tools like InstaText to edit our writing.

This does not mean that we should not use generative AI tools, which undoubtedly have a positive impact on various aspects of our personal and professional lives. It just means that we should be more attentive and selective when it comes to the contexts and the extent to which we use them. It’s about weighing up the pros and cons, not just in the short term, but in the long term.

Improve your writing and cognitive skills with InstaText

If you are already using InstaText, we believe that you will now pay more attention to the suggestions, knowing that with the interactivity of the edits you can not only improve your work and writing skills, but also develop your cognitive skills over time.

If you have not used InstaText yet, we suggest you try it out for free and see for yourself the unique editing experience it offers.