ProWritingAid (a review). What does it do and should you use it?
For the impatient among us: ProWritingAid (PWA) checks your writing for potential errors and offers suggestions to fix them. And yes you should use it. Especially if you’re an independent author, like me.
Now for the nuts and bolts. Let me get started by showing you PWA’s primary editing screen.
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(Using the manuscript for Beware the Thorns, since it’s already out and I’m in the middle of 2nd edition revisions before re-publication.)
What you are looking at is a Scrivener file opened in PWA. And although it does not show italics made in Scrivener, all changes made in PWA save properly to the Scrivener project file. I’ve been using it like this for a few weeks now and it’s brilliant!
Okay, to the features. I know you’re not blind, but let me reiterate some of what you can see above. This thing can check for style issues (including inconsistent quotation use and mixing UK English with US English). It looks for incorrect spelling and grammar, of course, and analyzes the readability of your work. The Cliché feature is pretty cool, looking for things like “kicking herself” and “my bad”. Diction looks for vague words, allowing you to strengthen your writing with more active narration.
All Repeats and Echoes do similar things, but Echoes focuses on repeated phrases in close proximity, where All Repeats looks for, well, all repeats. Almost every writer has words and phrases they overuse without meaning to, things a professional editor would likely catch, but us indies don’t all have the luxury of shit-tons of money with which to pay for such services. Programs like Grammarly and ProWritingAid are invaluable to us in this capacity.
On a related note, the Overused function reveals your usage of commonly overused words within your “genre”. I use this word loosely, as PWA doesn’t identify “Fantasy” or “Horror” and whatnot, but rather “Academic” or “Creative” and so on. Still, I found this feature useful. The Sticky feature will highlight sentences in which you have a high number of the 200 most commonplace words in the English language. I will admit this is a highly useful tool, as it forces you to consider your writing in ways that bring new life to it, but it is also one of the most time consuming edits PWA will lead you into—this is not a negative but a warning.
Sentence is another incredibly helpful tool, showing your relative sentence lengths as a graph. Check out the left panel below for an example.
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Holy shit! I have 7 40+ word sentences? Have to look at those when I’m done with this blog post…
There are a host of other features that are largely self-explanatory, as you saw in the first screenshot. Want to check for unintended plagiarism? Maybe you want to know your dialogue-to-narration ratio? Or perhaps you want to run the entire damned WIP through the thesaurus. PWA can even examine your pacing.
The bottom line for me is that this program improves my writing, and me a better writer by extension.
As for the negatives, I only found one thing that truly bothered me: the context menus. When you hover over PWA’s prompts for suggestions, the pop-up is sleek but obtrusive. And when you’re hovering over suggested changes in the list to the left of the editor, the pop-ups are too sensitive, appearing and disappearing with even slight shifts of the mouse. Still, I got used to these minor annoyances and I can’t say enough good things about this program.
Now, what about cost? As of this post, the costs are as follows:
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You can also use the discount code KINDLE40 for 40% off, assuming the discount code is still active when you subscribe. And yes, this is subscription based software, same as Grammarly, but you’ll find that PWA is vastly cheaper and owns all the same functionality.
Really, fellow indies, there is just no reason not to use this software or one like it. Help your writing, help yourself. Want to look into it more? You can find ProWritingAid’s website here. If you have questions regarding the software, please put them in the comments below.
Peace, all!
