Photography by Megan Mumford

You’ve probably heard about all the ways in which AI is ruining education—namely, how students are getting out of hours of work by submitting essays written entirely by ChatGPT. But what if there was a way educators could actually use AI to help teach writing? Turns out, there is—and the world (yes, the world) has a Saratogian to thank for it.

Meet Jane Chen, the New York City–born daughter of Chinese immigrants. After spending her formative years in Shanghai, Chen returned to the States not speaking a word of English. She landed a scholarship—which she calls her golden ticket—to a prestigious private school on the Upper West Side, and went on to study history at Harvard. She then spent the next decade working on Wall Street in investment banking—“super-exciting, thrilling stuff,” she says, sarcastically—before getting into the world of hedge funds, which prompted a move to Europe.

Eventually, she felt like she’d done it all. “I was like, I’ve already been a banker,” she says. “I’ve already traveled everywhere for investments. I’ve already built a team. Our first year running the fund, we came in second in all of Europe. And I was just like, this cannot be every day for the rest of my life.”

So she pivoted…big-time. While living in New York, Chen had volunteered as a writing tutor for immigrants, and even drove across the country teaching writing in different cities. What she found was that the only people who cared about writing were the high school seniors working on their college essays. “It drove me crazy that that was the only time where all the parents and all the kids were like, ‘We need to write well,’” she says. “And I’m looking at their essays and being like, these are problems that should have been dealt with 10 years prior. Why is it only now that you’re trying to figure out capitalization?”

While Chen’s inspiration to start a writing school was based on anecdotal evidence that our nation’s students need writing help, that anecdotal evidence was spot on: According to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, three-quarters of both 8th and 12th graders lack proficiency in writing. Chen set out to change that—with a poster board touting her brand-new writing school, and a dream.

“No one signed up,” she says of her first push for enrollment for what she then called Eyre Writing Center. “I was like, this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done—maybe I should go back to my old job.” She eventually got 30 kids to sign up for the first term, and taught small classes at the Chinese Community Center in Latham and Saratoga CoWorks on Regent Street. Then Covid hit, and enrollment tripled. So Chen pivoted again.

“The inflection point really came around 2022,” she says. “Five hundred students signed up for our summer camp. We couldn’t handle that amount of students. That’s when we decided to pivot to a tech platform. Because Google Classroom wasn’t cutting it.”

And thus, Eyre Writing Center became Letterly, a product Chen describes as an AI-powered writing coach that keeps humans in the loop. Today, Letterly serves more than 3,000 students in 30 states and seven countries. The company has seven core employees, plus a team of more than 50 contracted editors and writing coaches.

Letterly aims to address the three main problems Chen sees with the way we teach children to write. No. 1: Kids are not writing enough in school. No. 2: When they do write, they’re not getting the feedback necessary to improve. And No. 3: They aren’t writing about things they’re interested in. When kids (typically ages 8-18) enroll in one of Letterly’s bootcamps, they’re signing up to write multiple drafts of lots of stories on topics they actually want to write about.

Letterly offers a range of services, from one-on-one private tutoring to multi-week boot camps during which students produce between 10-40 articles. After an introductory session, students choose from a list of writing prompts and get to work. When they submit their first draft, it’s fed to an AI, which provides feedback that a human then reviews. Then it goes back to the student, who creates a second draft. 

“We all know that the learning happens in the second draft,” Chen says. “The goal is to get the student published. Over the last few years, we’ve published almost 13,000 articles entirely written by our students in an online journal. And they’re so proud. When a kid is like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m writing about something that’s relevant, about something that’s current, about something that I care about,’ it totally changes the way they view writing. It becomes a form of communication rather than just their teacher being the audience.”

Now, the Letterly team is looking outward at the ways in which their product can help support existing institutions, including Double Helix, the Australian science agency’s youth magazine, and Saratoga Living. (Yes, when interviewing Jane for this story, we realized there was room for collaboration; check out our joint writing competition before February 16.) Letterly’s next frontier? Schools. Thanks in part to funding from The Robin Hood Foundation, a charitable organization that works to alleviate problems caused by poverty in New York City, Letterly is gearing up to launch a new product specifically for schools that will track students’ progress over time. Chen’s team has already partnered with Brooklyn Tech, the largest high school in the country.

The possibilities—and potential for impact—are basically endless. And to think: It all started when an equity fund manager quit her job to start a writing center.

“Everybody’s on this world for a reason,” Chen says. “I didn’t want to leave this world knowing that I didn’t do everything I possibly could to contribute just a little bit. I wanted to make the world a little bit better than it was when I joined.”  

Meet the Team

Though Letterly is a global company with 50-plus editors and coaches, the core team has hyperlocal ties.

Ania Alberski, M.S.Ed

Title: Director of Education

Local tie: From Albany, but based in Ann Arbor, MI

Previous experience: Middle school teacher and afterschool program organizer for Teach for America

Favorite thing to write: Science fiction, especially with a YA focus

On her writing style: “Em dashes are the only thing holding me and my writing together.”

Eric Ferrone

Title: Director of Partnerships

Local tie: Lives in Saratoga Springs

Previous experience: Teacher turned dean who went on to work in education technology partnerships

Favorite thing to write: Anything related to world-building (because problems within a fantasy world are much easier to solve)

On his writing style: “An editor once told me they needed to create an evacuation plan for the excessive amount of words I jammed into my run-on sentences.”

Adam Feldman

Title: Director of Business Development

Local tie: Lives in Saratoga Springs

Previous experience: Middle school math teacher and investment banker

Favorite thing to write: Anything that makes the reader smile

On his writing style: “I’ve had writer’s block for 40 years. I now use ChatGPT to write the first paragraph, which has unlocked four decades of pent-up creativity.”