Useful Words: a bilingual companion for the moment a sentence stalls.
A writing tool for English-language learners, started in my own classroom and rebuilt over eight years until it sat where the writing happens.
A student would be halfway through a sentence, then stop.
Not for lack of a word. The word for the idea was there. What went missing was the next one, the one that carries the thought forward, that adds to it or turns it or brings it to a close. So the student would leave the document, open a dictionary or a translation app, and look. By the time they came back, the sentence had gone cold. I watched this happen the same way for years, across classroom after classroom of teenagers writing in their second language, and later with students drafting for advanced English proficiency exams.
A dictionary tells you what a word means. It does not tell you which word you need next.
The tools my students reached for were built to answer the wrong question. A dictionary is organized for looking a word up: by spelling, toward a meaning. But a learner stuck mid-sentence already has the meaning. They are asking something a dictionary cannot hear. How do I get from this idea to the next one? How do I add to it, set it against something, put it in sequence, land it? The vocabulary they were missing was the vocabulary of moves: the connectors and transitions and set phrases that hold a piece of writing together. Nothing they had was organized that way. So the question I started with was whether you could index words by what a writer is trying to do, rather than by how those words are spelled.
I built every version of it myself.
Across eight years and three rebuilds I did the research, the content, the design, and the front-end. The tool never had a team. That was a limit, and the reason it could stay this specific to the students in front of me.
- Observed English-language learners stall mid-sentence, in class, while drafting.
- Interviewed students about where the writing broke down.
- Curated the word lists from my own teaching materials, later grounded in Cambridge exam materials.
- Designed and built each version, from a 2018 desktop app to the current mobile-first site.
- Tested with my own students and folded what I saw straight back in.
I indexed the words by the move, not the meaning.
The first version, in 2018, was a set of lists grouped by what a writer was trying to do. One list for placing things in time: as soon as, by the time, meanwhile, eventually, prior to. Others for adding, for contrasting, for concluding. A student who knew they needed to carry one idea into the next could find the phrase by its function, without guessing the first letter. Ordering by intent rather than alphabet is what made the tool worth opening, and it survived every rebuild since.
The 2026 version keeps that backbone and layers eight academic topic areas on top, the subjects that come up again and again in proficiency exams, from technology and the environment to work and education. A student writing about one of them now finds the topic vocabulary and the connectors in the same place, in either language.
Add
furthermore
in addition
moreover
Contrast
however
whereas
even so
Sequence
as soon as
meanwhile
eventually
Conclude
therefore
in short
to sum up
I kept the content curated, even when I let AI help rebuild it.
The words came out of teaching. First from the materials I had written for my own classes, then checked against Cambridge exam materials so the vocabulary matched what the exams reward. When I rebuilt the tool under the Human in 2026, I used AI to move faster through the build itself. I did not use it to write the content. A learner has no way to tell a real collocation from a plausible-sounding wrong one, and the cost of a confident mistake lands on the person least able to catch it. So the curation stayed human. The speed came from the tools.
Eight years of moving it closer to where the writing happens.
The 2018 version was a desktop app. You installed it, and it sat in its own window. A redesign in 2019 roughly tripled the content and tidied the interface. The change that took me longest to see had nothing to do with features. My students were not writing at a desk with an app open beside the page. They were writing on a phone, in a notes app, between other things. So the 2026 rebuild is mobile-first and lives in a browser, one tap from the document, with a word of the day, search in English or Chinese, and a shuffle die for when you do not yet know what you are looking for. Each version closed more of the distance to the moment a sentence stalls.
Students use it to write. Then they found a use I had not planned.
They reach for it mid-draft, which was the whole point. The app-switching that started this, the leaving and the lost thread, mostly stopped.
The better outcome was one I did not design. In class, the shuffle die turned into a speaking exercise. A student taps it, gets a word, and has to use it out loud, on the spot, in front of everyone. What I had built as a quiet writing reference became a game for talking, and that is now part of how I run a room. The tool is live, it is bilingual, and it is in my own teaching every week.
It is not only mine now. The other teachers at Human use it with their own classes, and their feedback is what decides the next thing I add.
What I would do differently: I built a desktop app for a problem that lived on a phone.
In 2018 I shipped a desktop application. It was the kind of thing I knew how to make, and it felt like a real product. But the moment I was designing for, a learner stuck in the middle of a sentence, was already happening on a phone, and before long it was happening nowhere else. It took me until 2026 to put the tool where the writing was. The lesson I keep from that is plain. The container was never the value, and access belongs in the design from the start. The proof that I could still get closer to the work: my students found the best use of the tool, the speaking game, before I did.