Show HN: WriterKata – a site for writers to practice their craft

I am a (web) programmer by day, writer by night. I&#x27;ve written a couple novels, unpublished so far. A few weeks ago I sat down to sharpen the saw and after struggling to come up with something to write about, I realized I could use a tool to give me random writing exercises so I can focus on the writing itself. Something like a writing prompt, but more compelling and interactive. Inspired by the practice of coding katas, I decided to create WriterKata. It has a hundred or so exercises so far, a social aspect, and some slight gamification features. Any writers in the HN sphere are invited to check it out, give feedback, etc. It is 100% free.<p>Of technical interest, this is my first Node&#x2F;Express site, coming from the Rails world. I enjoyed the low-level nature of it but did miss a lot of the built-in features Rails gives you. Don&#x27;t know what you got til its gone, I guess. :-)

This can also be a very useful tool for elementary school students. So, you may want to also produce a junior-writerKata version. While adults would not pay for themselves for writerKata, as &quot;parents&quot; they would be more willing to pay for it for their children to improve their writing skills.

It&#x27;s been a while since I&#x27;ve had to know what a participle is... but I am interested in improving my writing.<p>Why not define the terms and give an example of each... atleast to folks who are not logged in.<p>Props to you: This is a very cool idea.

LOVE IT!<p>Not sure I&#x27;ll use it, but I love it. Reminds me of that time I did NaNoWriMo and we gave random little challenges to each other to spur us ever onwards in that quest for 1666 words per day.

I accidentally registered as a user when I hit enter with the email field containing only the letter &#x27;t&#x27; and the password fields empty. Just thought I would let you know.

If you really want to improve the base of katas, allow fellow HN writers to submit their own for you to review and add to the pool -- I&#x27;d love to add some!

For someone that excelled at writing at school but never took it any further than that, this was an excellent experience for me to get me thinking about writing creatively again.<p>What would be amazing is to let me not progress until I successfully met some of the grammar conditions that were placed upon the sentences&#x2F;paragraphs (eg. I had to google what an appositive was) but was not sure if I successfully used it correctly.

Oh this is neat. Would be super cool if you could view how others did the same exercise.

Hijacking this thread to ask: is there a service or community where you can get your writing evalueted by human being? The purpose would be to improve my English writing skills. Paid services are OK too.

I am surprised at myself, but I love this! I&#x27;ve been at it for maybe 20 mins &amp; want to quit. But I haven&#x27;t yet.<p>PLEASE PLEASE make some way to share&#x2F;see others&#x27; responses!

Hi,<p>lispylol: you can view other&#x27;s &#x27;public&#x27; cycles.<p>Question to creator: how do I make my cycles public? Have been scrutinising the interface, perhaps not closely enough ;)

This is great. I have recently been intrigued with the idea of writing a novel. Thanks for this!

My writing skills suck. This would be really helpful!

in martial arts, when we use the word kata, we mean very abstract and advanced structures, while the basics are referred to as kihon