ProWritingAid Review

ProWritingAid is a grammar and style editor that will help you improve your writing. It checks for spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and also offers suggestions on how to improve your writing.

I’ve been using ProWritingAid on a few of my essays and have been impressed with the results. It has allowed me to remove complex grammatical mistakes, style errors, and my overall results. Besides this, I love the plagiarism check and the ability to check for overused words.

ProWritingAid analysis on a short essay.

ProWritingAid supports multiple different programs, including Chrome, Word, OpenOffice, Scrivener, and others. I have the most experience with the Chrome and Word tools, so that is what I’ll mainly be testing today – I’ll also talk about them in a little more depth later in the review. ProWritingAid also has an online app that allows you to copy text into. The online tool is also free for less than 500 words, so you can get a taste of ProWritingAid for free.

ProWritingAid is a spell checker, and it will pick up misspelled words and highlight them in red for you. When clicking on the spelling mistake, ProWritingAid will give you various options, with corrections at the top, and the ability to disable the rule and ignore that word.

Spell checking this post with the Chrome extension.

For me, the most important feature of the app is the grammar and style checker. Whilst Word, what I write my essays in, usually picks up spelling mistakes, its grammar checker is less than optimal. This is where ProWritingAid really comes in handy – it picks up unnecessary commas, redundant apostrophes, readability enhancements, and much more. Readability enhancements are particularly useful – they allow you to simplify complicated expressions down to a much more concise one and improve the flow and reading of your work.

ProWritingAids ‘overused’ feature is also helpful, allowing you to view words that have been overused, and suggesting how many should be removed to improve readability. This is useful as it reduces the repetitiveness of a document and therefore makes it easier and more enjoyable to read.

The tool also offers many, many other checks, such as pacing, dialogue tags, eloquence, and much more – these are mostly for fictional writers however, so I don’t have too much experience using them.

Along with the online tool that ProWritingAid offers (which you can download a desktop version of), ProWritingAid offers plugins for popular writing programs such as Word, Google Docs and Scrivener. It also offers a Chrome and Firefox plugins, and it supports a few other programs. I use both the Word and Chrome plugins extensively and occasionally the Scrivener plugin.

I mainly use Word for writing essays, and as a result, use ProWritingAid for more advanced grammatical mistakes, overused words, and readability. ProWritingAid allows you to view a summary of your document, including graphs about readability, overall scores, overused words and much, much more.

The summary in a Word document.

Whilst this gives you an easy overview of the document, the real power of ProWritingAids integration with Word is the ability to highlight your mistakes and allow you to change them in one click. Clicking on ‘Grammar’ in the toolbar makes ProWritingAid analyse your text and then bring up all your grammatical errors. You can then view them on the document and click them there, or click on the sidebar to jump to changes and make them quickly. This interface also highlights spelling mistakes in yellow.

ProWritingAid highlights areas with grammatical errors in purple. You can then individually edit or use the sidebar to jump around the document.

The ‘Overused’ option is also useful, allowing you to see what words you have used too much and change them to make the document more readable. To add, the plagiarism feature checks millions of documents online to make sure you will pass your school’s plagiarism checks.

A brilliant thing about the Word extension is that it is all done natively in Word – other tools often open an external program which can be quite a hassle, but ProWritingAid makes it easy to improve your document.

I also use the Chrome plugin a lot and am very impressed with it. The Chrome plugin picks up spelling, grammatical and style mistakes in real time, allowing you to click on a button to bring up a more detailed view of your text and mistakes.

Using ProWritingAid in Chrome – note the orange circle, showing there are mistakes in the document. Blue underlines show grammatical mistakes.

The ability to bring up the full ProWritingAid experience with a click is also very useful, allowing you to use the style and readability features of ProWritingAid. This lets you get the sidebars that show you an overview of what is wrong and needs correcting.

ProWritingAid on Chrome in full screen, editing this post.

I’ve only scraped the surface of ProWritingAid – it has many, many more features that come in handy, particularly for writers. If you need a more advanced grammar checker, I would recommend ProWritingAid.

This being said, the price is high for ProWritingAid. You can pay monthly at £20, yearly at £70, and a lifetime licence for £240. If want to add plagiarism checks for free (a useful feature for students), the price increases to £24, £80 and £340. This makes it expensive for many people, especially students, to purchase. However, it is the best grammar checker I have used, and I would recommend the investment in it.

You can view the ProWritingAid website here.

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REVIEW OVERVIEW
Features
Interface
Ease of Use
Price
prowritingaid-reviewProWritingAid is a useful grammar checker, which is easy to use. Whilst the interface can sometimes be a little cluttered and confusing, it doesn't take much time to get used to it. Whilst I think ProWritingAid is very expensive, they earn points price wise by offering a lifetime plan that still gets updates.