Whether you write for work, school, or leisure, you might need a writing aid.
Simple spelling and grammar mistakes can put off your audience. Even if your grammar is thorough, a writing aid can help you identify subtle issues with style, structure, and variety.
If you’re looking for a grammar and style checker, is ProWritingAid your best option? This ProWritingAid review will cover its features, pricing, and how to get started.
What is ProWritingAid?
Screenshots from ProWritingAidProWritingAid is a tool to check spelling, grammar, and style for all types of writers. It has unique tools for creative, academic, and business writing, including live suggestions and detailed reports.
ProWritingAid is a competitor to Grammarly, the most well-known writing aid software. Other programs in the same field include Hemingway, WhiteSmoke, and WordTune.
Since its founding in 2012, this software has built an audience ranging from major authors to first-time bloggers. This ProWritingAid review will explore the app’s many features and functions.
ProWritingAid Review: Pricing
ProWritingAid has two types of paid options, laid out a bit confusingly on their site. If you go to their pricing page, as seen above, you’ll find a simple pricing model for a single premium tier. This tier comes with enhanced security, integrations, and unlimited analyses.
Premium
According to this page, you can pay $20 for a monthly subscription. The regular price is $79 for an annual subscription or $399 for lifetime use. As shown above, they sometimes have special discounts; students get 20% off any time. If you have a lot of use for a grammar checker, a one-time payment may be attractive. The other prices, while not exactly a bargain, are lower than many other writing aids, including Grammarly.
Teams
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the “Pricing” page would contain every pricing option, but to locate team pricing, you’ll have to tab over to “For Teams.” There, you’ll find their team plans, which start with an… individual plan. Are you with me so far?
The $6/mo team plan for individuals seems to be cheaper than the premium plan billed monthly or yearly. It also seems to come with additional enterprise options, which are expanded further at the Teams plan ($8/mo/user). They offer bespoke plans for enterprise customers.
Free
But apart from all that, you can use ProWritingAid for free. While it doesn’t have all of the premium features, their free web editor is usable by all with a simple sign-up.
ProWritingAid Review: Getting started
While you can access paid tiers from the various pricing pages, signing up for ProWritingAid’s free version is as simple as putting in an email and password. Once you’ve verified your email, you can hit “use app” on the homepage to be taken to your dashboard.
ProWritingAid Review: Features
Dashboard
At first, your web app dashboard will be basically empty. You’ll have to hit “New Doc” to get started with ProWritingAid’s writing and review features. Once you make more use of the app, your dashboard will show you all your documents in one convenient place.
Editor
Once you create a new doc, you’re taken to the real main event. ProWritingAid’s editor features an almost overwhelming amount of tools, all of which are at your disposal once you start writing.
To test out the tool, I pasted in a section from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. As expected, some of the archaic language choices upset the AI. Like Grammarly, it instantly highlights words and phrases it thinks are mistaken. You can view them in the right-hand bar or click on the text itself, where you have the option to fix it, ignore it, or remove the grammatical rule entirely.
Also on the right is the “Goals” tab, which assesses a range of specific writing goals on a percent scale. These may be a hindrance for creative writers, but if you’re a goal-oriented business writer, they can improve your output.
Reports
On top of real-time suggestions, you can use the top menu to find report cards for your writing based on several criteria. Your summary includes a more in-depth list of goals, while other reports show up on the left.
These reports work the same way as the real-time checker, underlining parts of your text with notes you can accept or ignore. Reports cover elements like style, repetition, and readability. They’re more likely to be insightful than practical. You may be interested to learn how many of your sentences start with gerunds, but you probably won’t think twice about it.
Sharing & comments
One unique feature ProWritingAid offers is the ability to share your work by link. This, along with a number of text style options, seems like a means of using ProWritingAid as a word processor. In that regard, it doesn’t quite succeed; it’s missing key functions like inserting images or downloading your work as a file.
Still, this allows others to see your work, ProWritingAid’s suggestions, and leave comments. I’m not sure where I, personally, would use it, but it may be useful for business writers and collaborative writing teams.
ProWritingAid Review: Integrations
Like Grammarly, ProWritingAid has some robust integration tools that let you use the service almost anywhere. First of all, the desktop app can interact with just about any word processor, working in formats ranging from Microsoft Word to HTML.
There are also plugins available that you can connect to Word or Google Docs directly. They offer browser extensions for Safari, Chrome, Edge, and Firefox. With these, you can get writing help on any site, be it your blog, social media, or even email.
ProWritingAid Review: Final verdict
ProWritingAid is powerful, feature-heavy, and user-friendly. If you regularly need a grammar checker, it’s a strong option to consider. Its wide range of reports can give you unique insight into your writing.
Now, the negatives. The free version of ProWritingAid only assesses 500 words at a time. It also doesn’t allow access to any of the integrated versions or the desktop app. Because of this, the free version of ProWritingAid isn’t as useful as some competitors.
Professionals with regular need for a grammar checker may invest in ProWritingAid, but for casual users, there are better options out there. It’s a high-quality tool, but its lack of free features limits its ability to stand out.
Final rating: 8.7/10
