ProWritingAid

Every writer needs a second set of eyes, and most of us cannot afford a human editor for every draft. That’s where a tool like this comes in. ProWritingAid is a grammar and style checker, and I like it a lot better than Grammarly, the one most people reach for first.

It’s good at everything you’d expect a grammar checker to be good at. Spelling, grammar, punctuation, the basics it handles cleanly. Where it goes further than the average checker is the style side. It flags awkward sentences and suggests ways to rewrite them, and that part is useful. It catches the repetition you stop seeing in your own work, the overused words, the sentences that all run the same length until the page goes flat. Twenty-five reports break your writing down from a couple dozen angles, and you can run any of them on a manuscript of any length.

A fair warning about the suggestions. If you turn on every check at once, you’ll get more recommendations than you can possibly deal with. It’s not shy. The trick is to turn on the checks you care about and ignore the noise. It also has opinions about commas, sometimes too many, sometimes too few, but Grammarly does the exact same thing. No automated tool has the comma fully figured out, and you shouldn’t expect this one to either. You’re the writer. The tool is a checker. You make the call.

Here’s the part most reviews won’t tell you, and it matters more every month. When the tool rewrites an awkward sentence for you and you take the rewrite as given, that rewritten text is AI-generated. It can read as AI to one of the AI-detection checkers people are running now. That’s true of every writing tool that suggests rewrites, Grammarly included. If you’re in a situation where AI detection matters, use the suggestions as a prompt to fix the sentence yourself instead of pasting in the machine’s version word for word. Let it point at the problem, then solve it in your own voice.

On the plan, I have a lifetime license, which they used to offer and I grabbed. For most people I’d recommend at least the Premium tier. The free version is limited, the way every free tier is limited, enough to see what the tool does but not enough to lean on it. Premium opens up the full set of reports and the integrations with Word, Google Docs, and Scrivener, and that’s where it becomes part of your workflow instead of a thing you paste text into.

Where it fits in the process matters too. This isn’t a first-draft tool. When you’re drafting, you want to get words down without something underlining every other sentence in red, because that kills momentum. Save it for the editing pass. Once the draft exists and you’re cleaning it up, run the reports, work through the flags that matter, and skip the ones that don’t. Used that way it speeds up the part of writing most people hate, the line-by-line polish, without getting in the way of the part where you create. I treat it as an editing-stage tool, not a writing-stage one, and it serves me far better for it.

I use it, I prefer it to the better-known competitor, and it does what a grammar and style checker should do. Just remember what it is and what it is not. It’ll make your prose cleaner and tighter. It won’t write the book for you, and you wouldn’t want it to. Use it as the second set of eyes, keep your own hand on the wheel, and it’s one of the better tools a writer can have.