Junior Nicole Sun, who helped found online peer-review community Prolitfic, said she believes all writers at UT should be given the opportunity to share their voice regardless of their majors.

“There are so many people who are good writers, they just get buried in all the noise,” said Sun, a business honors and Plan II junior. 

Sun and three other UT students founded Prolitfic, an online writing community, in January. Co-founder Dan Tran says they have garnered more than 150 users since then.

The website is similar to online writing communities like Wattpad, but with quality control. For example, Sun said many other writing communities do not have a way of filtering spam comments, but Prolitfic is currently looking for a way to only show relevant comments.

 “Writers are able to view analytics of interests to help them improve, like where readers drop off reading or where they get confused,” Sun said. “We’re all aspiring writers and readers, so we wanted a site that would basically combine the accessibility of self-publishing with the quality of traditional publishing.”

Sun, the head of strategy and marketing for the site, said she was inspired to create Prolitfic through one of her business classes.

“Our professor instructed us to do this very impromptu pitch activity, to pitch a new idea to reform a traditional industry,” Sun said. “I chose publishing because I like writing a lot.”

Tran, a management information systems senior, said she is impressed at the growing popularity of the website.

“It’s been really exciting seeing us just starting, a couple of months ago, from nothing to having a full-functioning site,” Tran said.

Sana Hameed, a management information systems sophomore, said one of her favorite aspects of participating in the Prolitfic community is that it does not require prior writing experience.

“It doesn’t matter that I’m a business major or that I don’t have any professional training or a string of writing-related classes under my belt,” Hameed said.

Prolitfic also offers writing workshops and monthly competitions for writers to participate in, Sun said.

Currently in the beta testing stage, Prolitfic is preparing a hard launch in the coming weeks. In the future, the Prolitfic team hopes to gain an even larger user base, Sun said. 

“There’s just so many people who want to write and have no opportunity to get their work out there,” Sun said. “We want to be that opportunity.”