The teaching of writing has too often involved teaching students to follow an algorithm. Your essay will have five paragraphs; start the first one in with a sentence about your main idea, then ...

The code-writing algorithm doesn’t work simply, but here’s how to think of it in simple terms. A math problem has inputs and outputs—or the numbers you have and the number you need to calculate.

For better or worse, writing for the benefit of search engines has tended to work, often pushing the really genuine and authentic content well into Page 2 of Google search results.

Other clients favor bloggy snarkiness. "It's no more difficult to write an irreverent story than it is to write a straightforward, AP-style story," says Larry Adams, Narrative Science's VP of product.

The algorithm then returns the given word, its part of speech, and its lemma, or base-form. Sentiment analysis is done using VADER: Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner.