ProWritingAid is an AI writing assistant that’s been on the market since 2012. Its features include rephrasing suggestions, in-depth grammar analysis, and a contextual thesaurus. PWA offers suggestions to improve your tone, spelling, consistency, and more. Whether you're a professional, a student, or a best-selling author, this AI writing assistant will help you make your writing shine.
Getting started with the desktop app is easy. Just download the app from your browser and sign in. This will open up the PWA dashboard featuring a row of options across the top. Once you enter text, the platform will start offering suggestions right away.
On the right-hand side are your goals and improvements. The goals tab shows a myriad of metrics ranging from grade level to jargon usage, sentence length, pacing, and dialogue tags. Users can run separate analyses to see how well they’re doing in each category. The goals tab also shows users how compliant they are with their style guide (if their company has created one). But for free users, only the first 500 words can be analyzed. Checking the rest of the document requires an upgrade to premium.
The improvements tab offers more granular edits like those you’d see in Grammarly. Each type of edit has its own color code (eg. misspellings are red and punctuation mistakes are blue). These are your standard errors in spelling, capitalization, preposition usage, and more. PWA will also check your grammar while you’re using other applications. Along the bottom of the screen are all the applications you can install PWA within:
- Google Docs
- Scrivener
- Open Office
- Edge Browser
- Firefox Browser
- Chrome Browser
- MS Word
- MS Outlook
Similar to Google Docs, the platform allows users to highlight sections of text and leave comments. However, users can’t share a license with anyone else – If you share a document with someone via email, they can only work on that specific document with you.
Another useful feature of this platform is the ability to select a “document type.” You can leave this on “general,” or choose something more specific if needed. Examples of document types include:
- Abstract
- Academic essay
- Business Book
- Case Study
- Fantasy Fiction
- Horror Fiction
- Web article
- Script
Once you select a document type, the metrics under the goals tab change. For example, an academic essay requires proper inline citations, while a business book needs to steer clear of too much jargon. Similarly, a work of fiction needs proper dialogue tags. These goals are automatically adjusted so you can scan your document for the unique problems you might encounter.
The platform’s Word Explorer and contextual thesaurus help you spice up your writing effortlessly. Use alliteration, rhyme, or find common phrases and examples to suit your content.
ProWritingAid vs Grammarly
So what makes ProWritingAid different from the popular competing tool Grammarly? One of the main differences between the two is that PWA offers more detailed suggestions overall. PWA offers suggestions for sentence length, redundant phrases, passive voice, and more. Users can run 20 different reports, which the PWA website boasts is more than any other editing software. Meanwhile, Grammarly is more of a classic grammar-checker without all the bells and whistles.
Some reviewers consider PWA to be much more thorough than Grammarly. But others have called it clunky and excessive. It really depends on the writer and what they’re hoping to get out of the platform. Someone who only writes emails at work would likely be satisfied with the free version of Grammarly. But someone like a grant writer, author, or blogger would be better off splurging on a paid subscription to ProWritingAid. While Grammarly is largely positioned for professional and non-fiction writing, PWA accommodates fiction and creative writing too. PWA even offers videos and quizzes to train you to be a better writer. So if improving your writing skills is a goal, PWA is the clear winner.
ProWritingAid Pricing
The platform offers two types of memberships: free and premium. Premium memberships are $20/month or $10/month if billed annually. They also offer a lifetime use payment option of $399, which would pay for itself within a few years.
The premium plan has several features that the free plan lacks, including:
- unlimited word count - type all you want and run scans for various issues
- plagiarism checker - make sure you’re not accidentally stealing others’ work
- snippets - quickly access and insert strings of text that you use frequently
- custom style guide - maintain brand consistency with acronyms, titles, etc.
- terminology management - customize your vocabulary
PWA is an affordable, multifaceted tool available to anyone who wants to seriously improve their writing. The platform allows you to master things like tone and clarity while creating original, polished content. With such a multifaceted approach to editing, PWA leaves no stone unturned in the process of helping you perfect your writing.
