Your writing could all the time be higher.
That is the unlucky reality of this job: irrespective of how long you do it or how much you learn, all the things you write might be improved to get a bit of closer to that elusive perfection.
You would possibly go cross-eyed by re-reading the article before submitting it. Eventually, most of us get used to biting the bullet and sending something that’s — ugh — adequate.
In search of a approach to submit articles and manuscripts with a bit of more confidence, I hired a virtual writing coach.
ProWritingAid is an online editor and plug-in for Google Docs, MS Word and other writing tools (except Mac sites) to allow you to spot grammar, spelling, style and word selection errors in your writing. They let me try the tool and write this ProWritingAid “Writing a Life” review.
You may consider it as an introductory writing coach or editor. The tool won’t replace a human editor (I am unable to help but say that as editor me…), but it may possibly allow you to improve your writing and strengthen your writing habits.
ProWritingAid will analyze your document and indicate grammar and spelling errors – nevertheless it goes far beyond that. It would also eliminate passive verbs, long sentences, hidden verbs, unnecessary adverbs, repeated words and phrases, and more common enemies of language. clear, concise text.
Founder Chris Banks originally created ProWritingAid to assist him along with his writing after moving from financial analyst to fiction author. He taught himself find out how to code and wrote an easy program that identified common pitfalls recent writers encounter.
Initially focused on fiction writing, the tool now enables you to see whether you are analyzing academic, business, technical, creative, casual, or web writing – because what makes one variety of writing good doesn’t all the time apply to other!
How ProWritingAid works
ProWritingAid has three pricing tiers, each with its own set of features and functions. Full details might be found below.
Free
- $0 per thirty days
- Essential writing suggestions, wherever you write
- Limit 500 words
- 10 repetitions per day
- 3 AI sparks per day
- Grammar, spelling, punctuation
- Word explorer and thesaurus
- Document type setting
- 100% data security and privacy
Bonus
- $10 a month
- Write and edit like an authority. No word limits
- Every thing at no cost
- Unlimited words
- Unlimited reformulations
- 5 AI sparks per day
- Advanced style improvements
- Custom style guide
- Fragments
- Over 25 writing evaluation reports
- Customizable suggestions
- Terminology management
- Comparison of authors
- Quotations
- Cooperation
- Unlimited document storage
- 1 review per day
Premium Pro
- $12 a month
- Unlock enhanced AI features to encourage ideas
- Every thing in Premium
- 50 AI Sparks per day
- 3 reviews per day
Once inside, you may work in your individual word processor or upload or copy and paste your document into ProWritingAid’s online editor. It would read your writing and use coloured underlines to display suggestions.
Here’s what it looks like on certainly one of mine recent posts for The Write Life: :
Hover over a phrase to see a suggestion. For instance, for the passive phrase “the writing might be edited” above, ProWritingAid suggested rewriting it to make use of an lively verb resembling “We will edit the writing.”
It also captures potential filler or security words, including “totally” and “actually” in my selection above.
You will likely get suggestions you don’t need to follow or that do not fit the kind of the publication you are writing for, so read them fastidiously before clicking to simply accept the suggested changes. You may turn off the “rule” should you don’t need to see these sorts of suggestions – for instance, I turned off suggestions for rewriting split infinitives because I’m such a rebel.
You may as well view a summary, which will provide you with a higher-level have a look at your text. This includes: ton details about your writing, from word count to reading level to different sentence lengths.
Listen to this report back to learn and improve your writing habits. My reports consistently show that I’m a bit generous with adjectives… like “consistently” earlier on this sentence. I want to work on this if I need to jot down something as much as Stephen King’s standards.
Who’s ProWritingAid for?
All of us have free access to grammar and spelling checking tools in word processors. And our texts often undergo an editor before publication. So why pay for editing software?
ProWritingAid it is best to wash up your draft before submitting it to the subsequent step. As an alternative of trusting your aunt or generous friend to read your text and say “it’s advantageous,” use this tool to x-ray your text and spot clunky wording before an editor does.
It’s price investing in:
- Creator: Polish your manuscript before self-publishing or submitting to agents.
- Freelance authors: Polish your copy before submitting your articles (editors will love you!).
- Students: Get a virtual second eye in your documents before you switch them in.
- ESL Writers: Use this tool to enhance diction and discover filler words and awkward phrasing.
- Latest editors: use it to coach your eye to enhance your writing.
In the event you often work with an editor, perhaps as a author at a newsroom or other organization, the tool probably is not price your money. It would largely do the work for which your editor is already paid.
Things you must learn about ProWritingAid
Free version ProWritingAid it’s nice should you just want to examine a little bit of your writing every so often.
Nevertheless, if you should use it often, I like to recommend the Premium version, so you should utilize the tool together with your existing text editor. ProWritingAid’s online editor doesn’t offer the form of change tracking or collaboration you may get with Google Docs or MS Word. Without integration, you’ll probably find yourself duplicating work.
Also note that you should be connected to the Web for the tool to work, so you can’t perform any checks when you are offline. A bit lame should you like uninterrupted hours of writing on a plane or at your individual Walden Pond. Chances are you’ll have to skip patches until you come to civilization.
The conclusion of our ProWritingAid review: ProWritingAid won’t replace human touch, nevertheless it’s top-of-the-line grammar checking tools, perfect for polishing your text as you write self-editing.
It’s an easy and cheap approach to discover your writing habits and ensure that you make the perfect impression on any editor or agent whenever you’re able to submit your work.
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