I love software tools. Anything that can help me organize my life and be more efficient and productive is going to get my attention. For example, I recently found a simple checklist app that’s helping me organize my day and make sure I get all my essential tasks done. Every morning it shows me a list of things I need to do; daily, weekly, every Monday and Friday, etc. As I get things done I check them off and they disappear from the list. The next morning there’s a brand new list… occasionally including a dreaded “Overdue” item.
When I started writing I found an exciting new world of writing tools. Kid in a candy store? Yep, that was me. I’ve tried a lot of them out. Some of them have been fantastic and I use them all the time. Others were duds that were relegated to the Software Graveyard. I’ll be reviewing some of the applications I use here, and I hope you find some of them useful.
One of my favorite programs is ProWritingAid, a grammar checker, style editor, and editing tool. There are a lot of grammar checking applications, like Grammarly, Scribens, Whitesmoke, and Ginger. They all do essentially the same thing: analyze your writing and generate reports for typos, overused words, style, reading level, and other information to help you improve your writing. Selecting one over the others comes down to how it works best for you: features, user interface, reports, integration with other applications, and of course cost. Some, like Ginger, are free; others, like Whitesmoke, have a monthly fee. Some have desktop applications, others are web-based “paste your text here” apps. Many of them have plug-ins for the Chrome browser.
I tried a number of them, and settled on ProWritingAid for one primary reason: integration with other products. ProWritingAid has a web application; a Chrome extension; a Microsoft Word plug-in; a Google Docs plug-in; and a WordPress plug-in. There’s also a desktop application for Windows and Mac that works with Microsoft Word, Rich Text Format, Markdown, and Open Office/Libre Office. And here’s what closed the deal for me: it works directly with Scrivener projects!
ProWritingAid has a good array of reports: Style; Grammar; Overused Words; Clichés and Redundancies; Sticky Sentences; Readability; Repeated Words and Phrases; Sentence Length; Overuse of Pronouns; Transition Words; Consistency; Pacing; and Dialog Tags; Diction; Alliteration; Homonyms; and Acronyms. It also includes a Contextual Thesaurus, and the ability to set up a House Style.
This is all well and good if you’re writing professional documents or literary fiction. But grammar/style checkers start to have problems if you’re writing historical fiction with period style, terminology, and possibly dialect. Thrillers and noir might get flagged for choppy sentences. Romances could get bad marks for long, lush paragraphs with too many adverbs and adjectives. And let’s not even talk about fantasy, science fiction, and horror!
So you might get a lot of flags on things that are perfectly fine for the genre and style you’re writing in. But most of the reports will still be useful for cleaning up and tightening up your writing.
Now let’s talk about that annoying pricing thing. Like many of the other style checkers, ProWritingAid has some features that are free to use. Others require signing up for the Premiun Edition. The price is pretty reasonable, the annual cost is currently $70, You can get a better price if you sign up for two years ($100) or three years ($140). But here’s the best offer: you can get a lifetime license for $240. I bought a one year license, and when I decided that this was the program I was going to use I got the lifetime license.
(Hint: they occasionally have sales with good discounts. As I write this they’re having a New Year sales with some pretty good deals. The lifetime subscription is 50% off at $120!)
Okay, let’s talk software! Do you use a grammar/style checker? If so, which one, and why do you like it?
I like SmartEdit. It integrates with Word, and does what I need, which is mostly overused words and phrases. But it also finds adverbs, redundancies, misused words, foreign words, cliches, dialogue tags, acronyms, proper nouns (good for finding names you’ve changed or misspelled), acronyms, potential risque words/phrases, punctuation, sentence length, sentence starts, and more. For me, it helps me get rid of “clunkers.” After writing 20+ novels, plus some short stories and novellas, I don’t really need a grammar checker anymore, or a style checker. I’m comfortable with my voice and I’ve got a good handle on grammar. Plus, I pay an editor for the things only human eyes can catch. I remember using a free trial of Grammarly on a single chapter. It flagged 27 “errors” none of which were correct. I’m not sure any software can do a good job with someone writing genre fiction.
Thanks for the review of SmartEdit, Terry. I missed that one when I was researching grammar checkers a couple of years ago. I’ll take a look at it. The proper name check sounds useful. I write fantasy, and I often misspell the names I make up.
You’re right, this kind of program is probably more useful for new writers for style checks. And I’ve yet to see a computer do as well as a human expert in anything creative. Have you ever seen any of the “poetry” written by computers?
My writing style is pretty good; at least that’s what I hear from my Alpha Readers (my wife and a couple of friends who get to see my first drafts). And when I was a software developer I kept getting kidnapped by the Technical Writing department to help with user manuals. But I have a few favorite errors, like flipping letters in a word or leaving off verb suffixes.
And then there’s the bane of my writing, mismatched quotation marks. ProWritingAid isn’t very good at catching those, but I fond a web app that does only one thing, and does it very well: Missing Quote Finder. ProWritingAid found two mismatched quotes in my work in progress; Missing Quote Finder found over a dozen. It only gets confused with multi-paragraph quotes.
Thanks for the tip on Missing Quote Finder. That’s another of my “can’t see the errors” issues.
Kurt, I use ProWriting Aid, also. It’s very helpful. Happy New Year!
Interesting tool. I’ve never used any before, but am checking out the two-week trial. It doesn’t like full mss, chokes, which is too bad. Be nice to do it all at once.
SmartEdit will let you deal with a full manuscript.
Thanks!
I’ve been trying SmartEdit out and I like some of the reports. I may add it to my toolkit.
I’ve done a couple of blog posts about how I’ve used SmartEdit. Here’s one, with links to others: https://terryodell.com/fine-tuning-the-manuscript-with-smartedit/
I’ve heard a lot of good things about Pro Writing aid, so I tried their free trial recently. Unfortunately, it’s not designed for use by blind writers. As an example, there are no keyboard shortcuts to move focus from one section of highlighted text to the next. I contacted them about this issue, and their customer support seems unconcerned. I was surprised to see this response from a subscription-based company.
Paul, I’m sorry to hear that. Definitely a checkmark in the “bad” column for them!
Interesting. I never thought to use any tool for my writing, except Excel to keep track of submissions. I’ll keep an eye on your series to see if something sounds right for me. Thanks!
Karen, there are a lot of really great writing tools available. There’s usually a learning curve, and sometimes it can be pretty steep. (I’m looking at you, Scrivener!) I recently picked up three programs on bundle/discount deals, and I’m going to be taking that kike on the learning curve with them and then reporting on my experiences.