ProWritingAid Review. Is It Worth it?

Whether you are a blogger, reviewer, academic writer, or corporate professional, writing your heart’s content is not a very easy task. However, there are proofreading software like ProWritingAid, Grammarly, and WhiteSmoke that can help you immensely to improve your writings.

In this ProWritingAid review, I will thoroughly discuss its features and my experience with the software.

There are several proofreading tools available in the market. Some of them are even free. However, not all of them are equally reliable. How reliable is ProWritingAid? I will eventually discuss it in this review article.

The main purpose of any proofreading software is to aid users in improving the quality of writing by carrying out spell, grammar, and writing style checks and providing valuable suggestions. Does ProWritingAid do it efficiently?

ProWritingAid claims to provide a state-of-the-art AI-based check for overused words, incorrect tenses, vague sentences, and inappropriate construction of sentences. How fair are these claims?

It is a no-brainer that every writer desires his/her writing to be enjoyable. And ProWritingAid integrates a fair number of smart tools that can improve the quality of your writing. But how good are these tools?

Let’s explore what is under the hood. Is ProWritingAid is worth paying for?

Here is what I will cover in this ProWritingAid Review

1. What is ProWritingAid?
2. Is ProWritingAid Suitable for You?
3. How to Initialize the ProWritingAid Editor?
4. How Does It Work? [ProWritingAid Features]
5. How to Use ProWritingAid With Microsoft Word?
6. How to Use ProWritingAid’s Chrome Extension?
7. ProWritingAid Alternatives
8. Is ProWritingAid Safe? [Answer to your privacy concern]
9. Subscription Plans. Is It Worth it?
10. ProWritingAid Review: The Bottom Line

What is ProWritingAid?

ProWritingAid is a writing editor and proofreading tool. It can identify spelling and grammar mistakes, contextual errors, and plagiarism.

The main purpose of this tool is to improve your writing before a trained human editor scans it. So, please understand that a human editor can’t be replaced by an AI-based tool and the same is true for ProWritingAid.

However, as a writer, we have our limitations in figuring out mistakes manually. And when it comes to figuring out our own mistakes, it becomes even more difficult.

ProWritingAid fits here. With a group of intelligent tools, it offers a wide range of corrections and suggestions for improving your writing.

According to the maker, at the time of writing this review, this tool suggests more than 1000 writing improvements, fixes 20 style issues, provides contextual thesaurus help, and learns your writing pattern as you write more. Indeed, it is impressive on paper.

Let’s see how exactly it performed during my test.

But before that, let’s ensure that this proofreading software is suitable for you.

Is ProWritingAid Suitable for You?

1. ProWritingAid for Writers:

ProWritingAid caters to a diverse range of users for different projects.

Many story writers use ProWritingAid as their main self-editing tool as it integrates flawlessly with book writing tools like Microsoft Word or Scrivener.

You can easily complete your proofreading process right inside from that software.

So, if you are a fiction/nonfiction writer, ProWritingAid is for you.

2. ProWritingAid for Students:

An increasing number of students are using writing assistant tools like ProWritingAid for their writing projects and thesis. It makes the writing process fast and easy by detecting unwanted grammar errors and improving readability.

Moreover, the plagiarism checking facility can save you from any embarrassment due to accidental plagiarism in writing.

So, if you want to improve the quality of your academic writing and grades, ProWritingAid is for you.

3. ProWritingAid for Bloggers:

Are you a blogger who wants to create captivating content for your readers?

Most bloggers these days earn through advertisement or affiliate marketing. However, to be a successful blogger you need to provide useful and easily digestible content to your readers.

ProWritingAid provides several corrections and suggestions that can hone your writing.

4. ProWritingAid for Business Writers:

Are you a businessman who writes reports, emails, presentations, applications, or other professional communications every day?

ProWritingAid can help you write precise, error-free business content for any type of communication. You can use their online writing tool for free.

So, if you belong to any of these categories, ProWritingAid could be immensely helpful for you.

How Did I Initialize ProWritingAid for This Review?

Testing a software thoroughly before recommending is very important. I took special effort to make sure that the results remain reproducible and verifiable to anyone. Yes! unlike many other reviewers, I have used ProWritingAid for more than a year.

Once you login to your web editor set your preferences from the “Settings” section on the top menu bar.

Here, you have the option of choosing from several genres of the English language. These options are ‘General English’, ‘American English’, ‘British English’, ‘Australian English’, and ‘Canadian English’.

Also, you can choose your writing style from one of ‘General’, ‘Academic’, ‘Business’, ‘Technical’, ‘Creative’, ‘Casual’, ‘Web’, and ‘Script’.

For this review, I have chosen ‘General English’ as the language and ‘Web’ as the writing style. This setting is important as it can modify the suggestions.

How Does It Work? [ProWritingAid Features]

Once you open the editor you will find a Menu Bar and a Writing Area. Menu Bar is further divided into 4 sections, Core, Repeats, Structure, and Readability.

This software provides 20 different correction suggestions and plagiarism reports. Below I am reviewing these features in detail.

1. Writing Reports

ProWritingAid automatically scans your writing for potential errors and provides useful suggestions with its realtime analysis feature.

Realtime analysis makes your proofreading easy as you don’t need to select individual options for relevant suggestions.

2. Writing Style Report

This flagship tool provides suggestions for better readability, repeated sentence starts, excessive use of adverbs, passive voice, hidden verbs, and several other improvements that you expect from a professional proofreader. You can improve the quality of your writing by incorporating suggestions from this tool.

How good is this tool? Let’s find.

To check this, I deliberately used a piece of content with some known issues. To my surprise, ProWritingAid performed beyond my expectations. Here is the screenshot.

As you can see there are 3 passive verbs, 3 hidden verbs, and 2 style improvement suggestions for my article. Once you click a suggestion, you get a detailed report.

Passive verbs reduce the engagement of writing and are, therefore, advisable to avoid it as much as possible. During my review, this Passive Verb Checker not only highlighted all passive verbs in my writing but suggested suitable active verbs also.

This suggestion was accurate for roughly 80% of cases. This is definitely a good number and I am happy with its suggestions.

Hidden Verbs Checker is another important feature of writing style reports. Using verbs in its purest form makes your writing compact and more engaging.

But several times, verbs are treated as nouns. For example, take a look at this sentence “Presidents of both countries reached an agreement.”

Here, “reached an agreement” is treated as a hidden verb.

ProWritingAid was able to figure out such minor issues with ease and suggested properly during my review session.

Adverb checker highlights all the adverbs present in your writing.

I used to use too many adverbs. While it isn’t a major issue, using them excessively can make my article uninteresting.

During my test, this tool performed impressively in highlighting adverbs and replacing them with suitable verbs.

3. Grammar Report

This artificial-intelligence based grammar checker supercharges your writing with advanced grammar checks.

Unlike Microsoft Word and Google Docs, this grammar checker digs deeper into your writing and provides very extensive suggestions.

Additionally, it explains the nature of mistakes so that you don’t make them in the future.

ProWritingAid can easily figure out hundreds of mistakes from a document, already checked by Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Premium version of ProWritingAid excels in carrying out grammar checks of any content regardless of their length. But the free version is limited to 500 words only.

4. Overused Words Report

There are several phrases and words in the English language that when used excessively weaken the quality of writing.

This report checks such problematic words and phrases and provides suggestions to eliminate them.

5. Cliché and Redundancy Report

Cliché and redundancy are two elements of poor writing. Avoid them as much as possible. This report helps you to get rid of such problems with creative original words and phrases.

6. Sticky Sentence Report

Words like ‘of’, ‘the’, ‘at’ etc. are commonly used in sentences.

ProWritingAid has identified 200+ most commonly used words in English writing.

While their usage is unavoidable, overusing them makes any writing hard to understand and reduces clarity.

Sticky sentence report highlights this problem and suggests improvements.

With the help of this tool, you can limit their usage and improve your writing.

7. Readability Report

Flesch Reading Ease score mathematically calculates the readability of your writing. I use this report very frequently as my aim remains to produce as readable content as possible. While writing this ProWritingAid review, I noticed some differences in readability score compared to Grammarly.

8. Repeats Check

One of the many issues that frustrate readers is the usage of repeated words.

Many times, I find it difficult to come up with a variety of words and eventually end up using the same word excessively.

ProWritingAid takes care of this issue with its Repeats checking tool. It detects repeated words, and phrases and provides useful suggestions.

The best part is, it beautifully draws out a detailed report of repeated words with their counts. Repeated words and phrases are highlighted, which allows you to replace them easily with suitable alternatives.

Of course, we can rectify this problem by reading the article manually but it isn’t convenient and hampers the flow of writing. Moreover, we can miss some repeated words even after going through the article several times and an automated repeats checker is a must.

What surprised me is the presence of another advanced tool, named “Echoes”. It checks the writing for repeated words, and phrases that have a very similar meaning.

During my ProWritingAid review period, I found this tool very helpful and working as intended.

9. Sentence Length Report

Sentence variety improves the engagement of your writing. This advanced report displays the average length of your sentences and its variety score.

Keeping an eye on this report can add an additional dimension to your writing.

10. Pronoun Report

Pronouns take the place of nouns while writing sentences with the same subject. You can’t use nouns all the time in consecutive sentences, that’s why pronouns are adopted.

But do you know that established writers use only 4-15% pronouns in their writings?

Using them excessively damages the quality of any work.

ProWritingAid reviews your article and shows the percentage of pronouns.

It also suggests dynamic words/phrases instead of boring pronouns.

This allows you to keep the number of pronouns within the limit so that your content doesn’t lose its engagement.

11. Transition Report

Transition words help the reader proceed from one idea to another. It maintains the flow of your writing.

This report checks your writing and suggests a healthy balance of transition words.

12. Consistency Check

Consistency determines the response of the reader. If your sentences are inconsistent, the reader will lose interest.

This tool highlights inconsistent spelling, hyphenation, punctuation, and capitalization.

13. Pacing Check

Pacing is important to create dynamism in your writing. While some sections need to be fast-paced, a slow-paced section can improve the storytelling quality.

A good writer uses this technique to play with his/her writing. While writing this ProWritingAid review I found that it can monitor slow-paced passages and provides useful suggestions.

14. Dialogue Tags Check

“Have you told him about that incident?” asked Jack. Here ‘asked Jack’ is a dialogue tag.

Using dialogue tags may reduce the importance of sentences and shifts the entire focus on what’s on the tag. So, integrating them into sentences is the best way to represent the sentence.

Dialogue tags checker in this proofreader highlights all the dialogue tags present in your article so that you can avoid them as much as possible.

15. Contextual Thesaurus

ProWritingAid has its own thesaurus with an extensive collection of vocabularies.

So, it is literally impossible for any unrecognizable words to pass the grammar checks (except for nouns, of course).

But this is not the end of it. Even your regular editing software provides thesaurus support.

So, what sets ProWritingAid apart from others?

The main difference is that the suggestions are customized according to your context.

ProWritingAid calls it Contextual Thesaurus. This feature enables you to find the correct word in several tricky situations.

For instance, words like “affect” and “effect” sound very similar. However, their usage may be different.

When you face such situations, this proofreading tool will display the meaning of the word and its usage in your sentence.

This helps in determining the best way to use such words and ultimately makes your article more enjoyable.

No doubt, we all face such situations every day and having an excellent proofreading software like ProWritingAid is no less than a lifesaver. While reviewing ProWritingAid, I found this feature very useful.

16. Diction Report

This feature finds, replaces unnecessary verbose phrases, and provides alternatives. It makes your writing crisp and clear.

17. Alliteration Report

ProWritingAid can highlight alliteration in your writing. Use this feature to spark creativity in your writing.

18. Homonym Check

Are you confused between ‘able’ and ‘abel’, or ‘accept’ and ‘except’ etc.? These are called homonyms. Use this feature to double-check your writing for possible homonym mistakes.

19. Acronym Check

ProWritingAid can check for inconsistent acronyms and possible mistakes in their usage. You can create a glossary of acronyms right within the editor.

20. House Style Check

You can produce a customized report by incorporating your own style guide rules.

ProWritingAid will review and highlight any deviations.

21. Plagiarism Report

This report helps you to check any accidental plagiarism in your academic writing or online content.

However, this feature is available for Premium Plus subscribers only.

So, this is what ProWritingAid pretty much offers.

These tools are vital for writing professional content. During my usage I found them working most of the time.

They helped me in eliminating quality hindering elements from my writing.

Now that we’ve taken a look at features of this software, you might be wondering its compatibility with your operating system and other productivity software.

ProWritingAid is available for both Windows and Mac. Support for Linux and Android would be very useful.

Besides that, it can be used with various writing tools such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, and Apache Open Office.

Browser support for Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge makes it one of the most versatile proofreaders I have ever used.

Whether you are writing an email or commenting on a Facebook post, ProWritingAid will constantly monitor your writing and help you compose better.

How to Use ProWritingAid With Microsoft Word?

Microsoft Word is the most commonly used editing software in the world. You can enhance the functionality of MS Word by using ProWritingAid as an add-in.

1. Download this add-in from the official website. Once the download is over, a file named ‘prowritingaidsetup.exe’ will appear.
2. Double click on that file. It will open the installation window. Agree to the license terms and conditions. Begin the installation process.
3. After the installation is done, open Microsoft Word and you will see a new tab, ‘ProWritingAid’, from where you can access various features of this software.

ProWritingAid for Microsoft Word is available to the Premium users only. However, you can use this link to avail free trial for two weeks.

In addition to MS Office, you can use ProWritingAid with Google Docs too. You just have to download the Google Docs Add-on from the official website and install it.

This will allow you to take advantage of ProWritingAid with Google Docs. I have used the online editor and Google Docs addon extensively while writing this ProWritingAid review.

How to Use ProWritingAid’s Chrome Extension?

The good news is that you can integrate ProWritingAid with all the popular web browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari as an extension.

To use it with different web browsers, you have to install their corresponding extensions. You can find them here for Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

The installation procedure is similar to that of Microsoft Word. However, I am showing them in detail for Google Chrome only.

ProWritingAid’s Chrome extension virtually makes this editor omnipresent. Follow these simple steps to install ProWritingAid’s chrome extension.

1. Click here to visit ProWritingAid’s official page.
   
2. Click on the “Install ProWritingAid extension” button for a direct link to Chrome’s app store.
3. Add the extension when prompted.
4. Your extension is installed.
   
5. Now click on the extension and use your login credentials to activate the extension.

ProWritingAid Pros and Cons

Pros:

1. ProWritingAid provides a big list of enhancement suggestions. More than 20 different kinds of reports will help you to analyze your work minutely. Along with grammar and sentence structure, it also helps you to improve the readability of your text.


2. Detailed explanations and contextual style suggestions not only improve the quality of work but teach you the corresponding rule also.


3. Data visualization through charts and graphs allow the users to see their writings in a whole new way.


4. Browser extensions for Google Chrome and Firefox make this proofreading software omnipresent. Now you can get useful suggestions while typing your emails, messages, and docs. Save yourself from making silly mistakes with the help of PWA.


5. It integrates easily with MS Word/Outlook, Google Docs, Scrivener, Open Office, and Final Draft. No matter what is your favorite tool of choice, there is a plugin for you. 


6. Available for both Mac and Windows.

Cons:

1. No mobile application yet. ProWritingAid does not have any mobile application. I’m not a big fan of writing on mobile devices; however, many people may prefer it.


2. Suggestions are not always relevant. PWA is not as accurate as Grammarly. However, considering the difference in their prices, it is a great value for money.


3. Your writing speed gets hampered due to live suggestions. While this may not be a disadvantage for many people, it’s annoying for people who work under tight schedules.

ProWritingAid Alternatives

ProWritingAid provides the best value for the bucks. It is suitable for both novice and experienced writers. If you are in need of a grammar checking tool that can also highlight style issues, ProWritingAid should be your first choice.

However if interested, you can try Grammarly or WhiteSmoke.

Grammarly is undoubtedly one of the most popular writing assistant tools but it is fairly expensive. You can read this article to avail discount on Grammarly.

Moreover, you can read my 8 Best Grammar Checkers review article for a comparative study.

Is ProWritingAid Safe? [Answer to your privacy concern]

If you are worried about your privacy then let me assure you that ProWritingAid is completely safe.

It does not store or share your writing with any third party.

Moreover, it uses a 256-bit bank-level security encryption model. So, the data transfer securely between your editor and ProWritingAid server.

Subscription Plans. Is ProWritingAid Worth it?

ProWritingAid comes in two different flavors. Premium Plan lets you use all of its editing features without any limitations. However, there is a catch. It does not include a plagiarism checker.

In order to use ProWritingAid’s plagiarism checking tool with its editing functionalities, you have to subscribe to the Premium Plus Plan.

A year-long subscription to the Premium plan costs $70 annually whereas the Premium Plus plan costs $80/year without any discount.

We offer an exclusive 20% discount to our readers. Use Coupon Code 1AZVX50DTA to avail this offer. Alternatively, you can Click Here to Apply this offer automatically.

If you are someone who writes regularly, you may consider buying a 2 Year Subscription Plan at a huge 50% discount.

ProWritingAid Review: The Bottom Line

It is no doubt that ProWritingAid stands toe-to-toe with some of the best editing software like Grammarly. While there are certain areas where slight improvements can be made, there isn’t any major issue with this software.

I’d certainly say that ProWritingAid is the way to go if you are looking for a professional tool for enhancing the quality of your content. However, no tool can replace a trained human proofreader and this software is not an exception.

It took huge effort to write this ProWritingAid review? Did you like it? Please comment below.