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ProWritingAid Review: UX, features, pros and cons, and rating

Item: ProWritingAid Review: UX, features, pros and cons, and rating
Rating: 7.8
Author: rev1

rev1 July 23, 2021

Summary

Writing is one of the most common tasks among people in the 21st century. Whether you're a student, Novelist, social media content creator, or employee, you are prone to making grammar and spelling mistakes. Therefore, having a grammar checker is essential to many people. ProWritingAid is one of the best apps that checks and corrects your errors in that respect. In the ProWritingAid review, I have discussed the quirks and features the app offers; plus, I have compared the free version to the premium version. I have also compared ProWritingAid to other rivals in the market.

Good

1- Detailed reports and analytics
2- Thesaurus
3- Realtime checker
4- Feasible premium plans including a lifetime purchase
5- Available on various platforms
6- Tailored writing lessons
7- Progress report
8- Virtually all premium features are included in the free version

Bad

1- Overlaying reports might lead to confusion
2- Limited plagiarism analysis even in Premium
3- The free version is limited to 500 words

7.8

Good

User Interface - 8

features - 9

availability - 8

premium value - 6

Writing is one of the most common tasks among people in the 21st century. Whether you’re a student, Novelist, social media content creator, or employee, you are prone to making grammar and spelling mistakes. Therefore, having a grammar checker is essential to many people. ProWritingAid is one of the best apps that checks and corrects your errors in that respect. In the ProWritingAid review, I have discussed the quirks and features the app offers; plus, I have compared the free version to the premium version. I have also compared ProWritingAid to other rivals in the market.

ProwritingAid User Experience (UX)
Sign up in ProWritingAid Review:
Realtime tab:
Summary tab:
Styling tab:
Quirks and features : ProWritingAid Review
Realtime
ProWritingAid Realtime features
More advanced features in ProWritingAid Realtime:
Summary tab, ProWritingAida
style tab
Grammar tab
thesaurus tab ProWritingAid
overused tab
combo tab
Repeats
structure
length
readability
sticky
clichés
Diction
Products and services ProWritingAid Review
ProWritingAid Review: Free version vs Premium
Free and trial version
Premium version and payment plans
ProWritingAid Review: Comparison
ProWritingAid vs Grammarly
Similarities
Differences
ProWritingAid Review
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Concise ProWritingAid Review:

ProwritingAid User Experience (UX)

When you visit the ProWritingAid website, you get a positive, reassuring feeling that you are approaching a professional business. Everything is neat and easy to follow. There is a one-line description of what ProWritingAid does, and there are three buttons that stand out thanks to their vibrant colors and positioning on ProWritingAid Home Page.

The purchase button screams in orange right in the middle of the page. I want to give credit to the designer for this subtle yet effective user navigation that doesn’t annoy the viewer by demanding to buy or install something. To the left, spendthrift, you won’t be scared away. The third button I noticed was the sign-up button. All in all, I find the webpage to be welcoming and user-friendly.

ProWritingAid Review: ProWritingAid UI (user interface), home page

In the next step, I decided to sign up, which took me less than 30 seconds. After you sign up, you can enter the ProWritingAid Web Editor. You can either type in your text in real-time or copy-paste previous works into the API. As often, I uploaded one of my student’s essay practices for the TOEFL test. To see how ProwritingAid works. I copied the essay from MS Word, and when I pasted the text in the editor, It asked if I want to keep the formatting. To be honest, I can’t think of a reason why somebody wouldn’t want to keep the source formatting. Anyways, I uploaded the text, and ProWritingAid indicated each type of mistake in a different color.

Realtime tab:

ProWritingAid has a lot of tabs. In fact, there are 25 ways in which your content will be reviewed and scored. Instinctively, I started with the first item on the left, the ProWritingAid “Realtime” feature. As the name suggests, It is the main feature that people look for when using proofreading applications. The ProWritingAid API offers instant corrections for most of your mistakes; there are, however, a few mistakes that the editor will only mention the general principles, and you have to come up with the correction yourself. As an English tutor, I find autocorrect counterproductive because students tend to skip through learning about their mistakes and use the autocorrect to hand in better compositions. ProWritingAid truly helps students improve their skills in that respect.

The Realtime tab detects basic grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes.

Summary tab:

The next tab is the summary tab which shows three general scores and 22 scores in different aspects. It also provides suggestions on the skills you have to work on. The list goes on; the alleged summary is so detailed that the word count exceeds the original text! While some people might consider this helpful information, I believe it’s overkill. If I spent so much time on such a detailed analysis, I would have edited the essay myself.

Styling tab:

Next, comes the styling tab, where some of your mistakes that make your text hard-to-read are altered. I would disregard some of the errors as they are part of the author’s writing style, And as a user who is often patient, I lost interest in exploring more tabs. I suppose they could have kept a proportion of those details to themselves and only showed the final suggestions. ProWritingAid also comes with applications for both Windows and Mac, Which we will discuss in the products and services section.

To recap my experience with ProWritingAid, I believe the first impression is excellent, and the website is easy to navigate. The editor works fine, even in the free version. The downside is ProWritingAid bombards the user with different analyses, which take a lot of time to go through, hence making it impractical.

Check out this ProWritingAid tutorial.

Quirks and features : ProWritingAid Review

As I mentioned before, ProWritingAid provides many detailed features that are overwhelming for someone who has just begun starting the app. However, some experts such as journalists and teachers might find these utilities valuable. In this section of the ProWritingAid review, let’s take a deeper look into ProWritingAid’s most significant features- since it would take so much time to give a detailed description of the subtle elements.

Realtime

The real-time feature is the first and perhaps most essential tab in ProWritingAid. It provides insight into your spelling, grammar and punctuation. As you type in or upload a text, the realtime checker automatically starts reviewing your work. ProWritingAid marks each type of error with a different color so that you can learn more from your previous mistakes over time.

You can simply click on any of the mistakes, and then ProWritingAid gives you a suitable replacement and also; the API also provides why that part of the text is considered a mistake. This function is similar to any other proofreading application in the market. The difference, however, is in that you can apply different goals to the exact text, and it would score you based on the context and the intended audience. For example, a “general” text with a score of 86 would get a score of 74 when I changed the goal to “general academic.” The app changes the priority of different composition aspects to define these goals. I have mentioned the aspects monitored for a “general academic” essay for further illustration.

ProWritingAid Realtime features

1-The first aspect is grammar, spelling and style, which is common in every writing goal you set. And It’s pretty self-explanatory.

2- Second, “transition usage” is essential to keep your work coherent; that’s why ProWritingAid keeps an eye on it.

3- Then, in the third place, you can see sentence length. Writing short sentences in an academic context is considered abecedarian. Surpassing a certain threshold, on the other hand, is regarded as wordiness. Therefore, ProWritingAid suggests you keep your average sentence length between 11 to 18 words.

4- readability grade: ProWritingAid reads your whole text and estimates how long it would take a reader to go through your article. Then you can overview your paragraphs to see what paragraphs are hard to read.

5- sentence variety: The next thing ProWritingAid wants you to do is make sure you have diversity. Using a monotonous script is dull and adding variety to your article helps you avoid annoying your audience.

6- Passive voice: not that using passive voice is wrong, but it can sometimes lead to writing a vague essay. While some other apps seem to be allergic to the passive tense, ProWritingAid appears to be more passive-tolerant.

7- weak adverbs: This is useful primarily if you use dictation apps to write down your thoughts. Since we tend to use catchphrases in our conversation and many of those catchphrases are out of context. It also marks irrelevant adverbs.

8-complex paragraphs

9- conjunction starts

10- very long sentences

More advanced features in ProWritingAid Realtime:

11- glue index: many professional writers can benefit from ProWritingAid’s glue index as an assistance tool. The software has driven the terms working words and glue words from a book entitled Plain English for Lawyers. Working words are the irreplaceable words in a sentence that convey the information, whereas glue words put those words together in a sentence. There is an optimum proportion between working words and glue words. Lack of glue words makes your sentence unclear and choppy; conversely, using excessive glue words slows down the reader.

12- -ing starts

In short, ProWritingAid uses a variety of algorithms to check your writing. However, going through all these reviews takes a lot of time and energy. Admittedly, the users can use some or all of these features. And for those of your texts shorter than 500 words, ProWritingAid proofreads for free. If you are a general user and don’t need more detail on the application quirks and features, move on to the Applications and Platforms section. Or continue reading to find out more about other interesting ProWritingAid reports.

Summary tab, ProWritingAida

The summary tab provides two types of reports on a separate pop-up page inside the browser tab. The first report is your Grammar Report. You can see the key scores at the top of the page, including grammar, style, and spelling.

Then according to your goal, ProWritingAid tells about the areas where your document looks great and where you need improvements. This method is a faster way to review your mistakes and save time than going through different aspects in the realtime tab. These items constitute the first section of the summary tab.

The second part of the summary tab is more analytical. ProWritingAid generates different statistics and demonstrates your performance in charts and diagrams. Since this report varies depending on your writing and goal, allow me to skip to the last and most exciting part of the summary report, according to this ProWritingAid review.

This is not random artwork. ProWritingAid demonstrates your most repeated words in style.

style tab

The style tab highlights several areas of writing that should be revised to improve readability, including passive voice, overuse of adverbs, hidden verbs and more. The review panel to the left will give you an overview of the writing style suggestions for your document.

The improvements fall into the following categories:

Style improvements
Readability Enhancements
Hidden verbs
Passive verbs
Passive index
Emotion tells
Long subordinate clauses
Adverbs outside of dialogue
Repeated sentence starts
Style guide items (more on that soon)

That’s a lot of categories. If you think this is too much work, you can go back to the summary tab and fix your mistakes from there. But you can also use the navigation menus for each to focus on the areas you want to prioritize.

Grammar tab

In this tab, the review panel on the left will only focus on your grammar, omitting all other issues and giving the minimalists a break from the usual complexity of ProWritingAid.

thesaurus tab ProWritingAid

This tab is my personal favorite as a teacher. It provides non-English speakers with a variety of synonyms and alternative words. You can see a report of how many words in your essay have other synonyms on the left panel. Those replaceable words are also marked in your original text. However, since words rely on context, many suggestions are not interchangeable when you consider that.

overused tab

The overused tab in ProWritingAid reports how many times you have used a particular word. If the number is high, It suggests that you replace one of the words with another synonym.

combo tab

You can see the mistakes you’ve made in the order of their category. This feature might be beneficial for teachers who want to check where their students require more attention.

Repeats

Two tabs regarding repeat named “all repeats” and “echos” check your text for repetitive words. The echos tab also considers how close the repeated words are.

structure

there are three separate tabs related to structure. The designated tab classifies all your sentences based on what they have started with and encourages you to use a certain proportion based on your goal.

length

You can see your total word count, character count, average sentence length, sentence variety, and the number of the words that compose each sentence sorted by their order of appearance.

readability

The following four tabs review how readable your article is. The readability tab in ProWritingAid reads your whole text and estimates how long it would take a reader to go through your article. Then you can overview your paragraphs to see what paragraphs are hard to read. It marks paragraphs that are very difficult to read and slightly difficult to read for editing.

sticky

There is an optimum proportion between working words and glue words. Lack of glue words makes your sentence unclear and choppy; conversely, using excessive glue words slows down the reader. For more information on the topic, check out the link from ProWritingAid.

clichés

This tab scours your work for cliches and highlights them. Nobody likes to read a cliche, so best to avoid them. Redundant expressions can also be removed as they say the same thing twice.

Diction

The diction feature provides a list of possible diction problems, highlights vague and abstract words in your writing, and reviews them.

More reports

IF going through all previous reports wasn’t enough for you, you can also check the remainder of the reports, such as alliteration, homonym, consistency, acronym, dialogue, pacing, sensory, house, and plagiarism. All of which apply to up to 500-word-long essays except plagiarism. If you want ProWritingAid to check the authenticity of your work, you should pay for the premium service.

Other features

ProWritingAid also contains a personal dictionary and snippets to keep track of your frequently used words and phrases. I find snippets beneficial to a wide range of people.

Products and services ProWritingAid Review

ProWritingAid is available on various platforms. You can add ProWritingAid to your browser as an extension to Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or MS Edge. The application is also available as an add-on in MS outlook and MS word. ProWritingAid also has a word processor of its own compatible with Scrivener. You can also have the application add-on in Google docs. The applications are for premium users. However, you can enjoy a 7-day trial before paying for these services.

ProWritingAid Review: Free version vs Premium

Free and trial version

ProWritingAid and all the quirks and features are available for free. However, the length of the text that you put inside the web application is 500 words. Considering how helpful the reports can be when writing a book or a critical essay, considering a premium subscription seems appealing. Before getting into details on the payment plans, you might want to try the 7-day trial version.

Premium version and payment plans

There are three subscription plans: a monthly 20$ plan, a 79$ annual membership, and a 399$ lifetime license. ProWritingAid claims that the lifetime plan is the most popular. From my perspective, lifelong membership in a world developing at a frantic pace is not ideal. Companies and applications rise and fall; in addition, there’s no guarantee that this app would be the best application in its niche in the future. So I would consider the annual subscription more suitable. With all that said, let’s see how ProWritingAid stands against the competition.

ProWritingAid Review: Comparison

Due to the growing popularity of proofreading applications, many existing applications can help you write better. Here are 10 alternative apps for ProWritingAid:

Grammarly
Ginger
WhiteSmoke
Sapling
PaperRater
Reverso
SentenceCheckup
Hemmingway App
Language Tool
Slick Write

ProWritingAid vs Grammarly

While there are plenty of similar applications, we decided to compare ProWritingAid and Grammarly. Although they are rivals, they have many similar aspects in what they do and their popularity in the niche. Thus, after discussing the similarities, the differences are scrutinized in the ProWritingAid Review to help you choose one of them or combine tham and utilize both applications.

Similarities

Easy to use
Friendly interface
Various linguistic correction feature
Viable free version
Diversity of platforms
Snippets and personal dictionary
Synonyms and thesaurus
Style and goal adjustments
Ample tutorials available
Business edition

Differences

Payment:

The monthly cost of Grammarly premium is 12.5$; on the other hand, you can acquire ProWritingAid for 6.5$ per month if you opt for an annual subscription.ProWritingAid lifetime purchase is also exclusive to the brand; however, I wouldn’t choose this plan because I want to have the best available app in the market, which might vary every year.

Plagiarism:

When using Grammarly Premium, you have unlimited plagiarism checks, while the number of plagiarism checks for ProWritingAid Premium is limited to 50 texts.

The number of reports: Grammarly includes five reports, where ProWritingAid is loaded with many reports and analytics. For the general writer and student, Grammarly is sufficient, however specific users might find ProWritingAid’s detailed reports beneficial. As an English teacher, sorting the reports by their type is more advantageous for my students and me; Nevertheless, both programs offer adequate details for your writing improvement.

Conclusion: both programs are excellent proofreading applications. While ProWritingAid is more economical and detailed, Grammarly is more user-friendly and minimalistic without hampering any of the features a writer needs. for more details on Grammarly, click the link to navigate to the Grammarly Review page.