ProWritingAid Review – Is it Good Enough?
For professional and inexperienced writers alike, the learning never stops. Whether you want to become more consistent with using proper grammar or you need to tighten your writing style, there’s always room to improve.
Writers no longer have to rely on writing classes to improve their writing skills. Software such as ProWritingAid can help you strengthen your writing across the board.
ProWritingAid starts with a grammar and style checking feature, so you can monitor the basic quality of your current projects. It then offers a variety of reports and suggestions to help you work on your writing craft. For a break from the hard work, it includes quizzes and videos that provide further information in a fun format.
Is this software worth your time and financial investment? Continue reading our ProWritingAid review to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of this software.
ProWritingAid Pricing
ProWritingAidFree
- Free version
- No integration with Microsoft Word or Google Docs
- Online only
- Limited to 500 words at a time
- No plagiarism checking
ProWritingAidPremium
- $79 per year
- Works with Microsoft Word and Google Docs
- Includes online or desktop versions
- No word limit
- No plagiarism checking
ProWritingAidPremium+
- $89 per year
- Works with Microsoft Word and Google Docs
- Includes online or desktop versions
- No word limit
- Offers 50 plagiarism checks per year
ProWritingAid Key Features
- Checks for spelling and grammar errors in real time
- Suggests better word choices
- Suggests better sentence structure
- Marks words and phrases used too frequently
- Marks overused cliches
- Checks for past and present tense agreement
- Offers a plug-in for Microsoft Word integration
- Integrates directly into Google Docs
- Offers both desktop and browser versions
- Offers multiple reports for writers
- Ranks overall readability grade level
What Makes ProWritingAid Different?
For those editors who need plagiarism checking, the Premium+ version of this software provides this option. ProWritingAid generates reports that teach you about writing, while the software helps you fix errors. ProWritingAid appears at a lower price point than its primary competitor, Grammarly.
ProWritingAid Review Pros
Here are some of the biggest advantages that we found during our ProWritingAid review.
Great for Writing Aficionados
For those who love the art of writing, but who are still working to perfect their craft, ProWritingAid is a strong choice. It generates explanations and suggestions about your writing style that can help you learn more about writing.
Not only does ProWritingAid find your tendencies that hold back the quality of your writing, but it will also give you ideas for avoiding these issues going forward.
Any writer can benefit from learning more about writing. ProWritingAid helps point out new things you need to watch as part of your writing style, while reinforcing traditional writing habits you should be using (but maybe aren’t).
Picks Out Redundancies in Your Writing
One of the most useful reports in ProWritingAid is its ability to find words and phrases you are using too frequently. Certainly, some writers rely on repetition to introduce a certain idea or to make a point in a humorous manner. However, repeating certain words too often can leave readers frustrated and can cause issues with search engine rankings.
Along with finding overuse of certain words and phrases, ProWritingAid is able to find phrases you’re using that contain extra words you don’t really need. For example, when you write that the meeting will occur at 9 p.m. Monday night, the word night is unnecessary. Writing that you and your team members will collaborate together is redundant, because the word together is unnecessary. ProWritingAid finds these issues for you.
Select a Style of Writing
With ProWritingAid, you can select a style of writing that you’re trying to achieve before you ask the software to check your text. The ProWritingAid software will take a different approach to checking your writing work when you tell the software you’re trying to write a document for academic purposes versus a creative writing project, for example.
Select among eight different styles of writing, including:
- Academic
- Business
- Casual
- Creative
- General
- Script
- Technical
- Web
Works Well for Fiction Writers
ProWritingAid will give fiction writers some advantages they don’t receive with other grammar checkers. For example, ProWritingAid offers support for Scrivener, which is word processing software designed specifically for fiction writers.
With Scrivener, authors receive the ability to create outlines that incorporate research notes and topic concepts, giving the fiction writer the information he or she needs close at hand. Scrivener even has templates that can help fiction writers start a screenplay or a novel.
Having the ability to use a grammar checker like ProWritingAid with Scrivener can be a significant benefit for the fiction writer who is seeking to create a document free of common errors that could cause a literary agent to dismiss the submission immediately.
Helps With Word Selection
If one of your biggest weaknesses as a writer is finding the most descriptive and appropriate word in your passages, ProWritingAid can help here. If the software determines that a more descriptive word would liven up one of your sentences, it will make a suggestion for a new word.
Additionally, should you have issues with using unwanted cliches in your writing, ProWritingAid will help you find a different word or phrase to replace the cliche with something that’s more appropriate.
As an added benefit of this feature, you will learn the meaning of new words. You then can incorporate these words in the future, strengthening your overall writing.
ProWritingAid Review Cons
Here are some of the most disappointing aspects that we found during our ProWritingAid review.
May Have Too Much Complexity
For those enamored with the idea of learning how to write and honing their craft, ProWritingAid has several outstanding features. However, for those who simply want quick suggestions on how to improve a passage, allowing them to implement the suggestions in a few seconds, ProWritingAid may have too much information.
This piece of software really works best for someone who wants to spend some time delving into the art of writing. It has numerous features designed to help writers learn why they should implement certain writing techniques.
If you’d rather not spend the time required to decipher the ProWritingAid suggestions to improve your writing, the large number of features will not benefit you. The software will just seem like it’s bogging you down.
Redundant Features
Although ProWritingAid will catch your spelling and grammar errors in real time while you’re creating your document, these features aren’t all that useful for the majority of people. After all, basic word processing apps like Microsoft Word and Google Docs will catch the majority of spelling errors and some grammar errors for you, making ProWritingAid’s spell checker feature somewhat redundant.
If you are going to pay for a subscription to ProWritingAid, make sure that you are going to take full advantage of the other writing help features in the software. It would be a little silly to pay for ProWritingAid primarily for the spell checker and grammar features. Additionally, we feel like ProWritingAid’s spell checker and grammar checker tend to slow the speed with which Word or Google Docs can operate.
Certainly, ProWritingAid catches more grammar errors than Word or Google Docs, but it simply isn’t worth the price of the software for the spell checker and grammar checker alone.
Aggressive Suggestions
Inexperienced writers certainly can benefit from ProWritingAid, as they can learn more about writing properly. However, some aspects of this software are almost too aggressive about pointing out potential problems, which may overwhelm an inexperienced writer.
ProWritingAid’s suggestions are just that — suggestions — but some inexperienced writers might feel like they have to take every suggestion as gospel, incorporating all of them. Doing this could cause you to remove some of the writing elements that identify your personal style, leaving you with a plain document that doesn’t grab the attention of your audience.
If ProWritingAid flags one of your passages as an error, but you are certain the passage fits the style of the document you’re creating, you need to have the confidence as a writer to ignore the suggestion and stick with your original wording.
It’s Not Grammarly
ProWritingAid is a strong piece of software to help with writing, but it doesn’t quite stack up to what you’ll receive with Grammarly.
Considering Grammarly’s overall popularity — and significantly higher price — this may not be a fair criticism. But for those who use Grammarly now or have used it in the past, the overall experience with ProWritingAid may be a little bit of a letdown.
Grammarly is the leading writing aid software package and with good reason. It allows you to work efficiently, and it has an easy-to-use interface that customers appreciate. The process of creating reports is less complex with Grammarly than with ProWritingAid too. It’s easier to find the exact information that you really want with Grammarly.
Now, considering Grammarly costs almost double per year versus what you’ll pay for ProWritingAid, you would expect to receive better features and a more pleasant user experience with the pricier Grammarly. So if Grammarly fits in your budget, it’s the better choice. If not, ProWritingAid is a more than capable substitute.
Our Recommendation
Those who write regularly in a job or in the academic world know the importance of creating sentences and passages that explain the desired concept in a clear and succinct manner. Using proper grammar and spelling is a key part of achieving that goal, as is achieving a professional writing style that gives your work a polished feel.
With a writing software tool like ProWritingAid at your disposal, you can avoid errors that make your writing seem unprofessional. You’ll tighten up your passages, making the document more enjoyable to read.
So can you benefit from a tool like ProWritingAid? Without question, nearly any writer can benefit from editing help. ProWritingAid does a nice job pointing out places where your writing passage could use some improvements, but it can’t do everything a good human editor can do.
Instead, think of ProWritingAid as the self-editing tool that you can use before you turn the document over to a human editor. Whether you write professionally or academically, your human editor will appreciate having the simple writing errors fixed before the document lands on his or her desk, allowing for focusing on the content (rather than the grammar).
We would recommend this tool to someone who struggles to self-edit. If you easily can implement corrections and find your writing errors on your own, using ProWritingAid likely will be overkill for you. However, because self-editing is such a challenge for many writers, ProWritingAid can be an invaluable tool.
The free version is far too limited for any writer to rely on for extensive work. We would only recommend using the free version to gain a feel for the software. If you like the way the free version works, you then can upgrade to the Premium version for $79 per year. You don’t need the Premium+ version unless you need to check others’ work for plagiarism.
