Proofreading Software: I want to believe

[Tony]

Copyeditors are invaluable. No question. For convenience and economics, I'd love to invest in proofreading software. Just don't know if it does the job. My typos are plentiful, especially missing words.

Anyone have any experience to share?

AVAILABLE PROOFREADING SOFTWARE. $ VARIES.
http://www.editorsoftware.com/
http://www.whitesmoke.com/
http://www.serenity-software.com/
http://www.grammarly.com/
http://www.intelligentediting.com/
http://www.gingersoftware.com/proofre...
http://www.mywritertools.com/

[Danielle]

http://prowritingaid.com/Free-Editing...#

I would suggest this one. Most of the rest are paid services (ridiculously expensive paid services). For example, whitesmoke costs $300, grammarly costs $99/year. This one is free. It has a massive database that it pulls from, catches the types of things you are looking for. Is it perfect? I'm not sure. I haven't used it enough to know. I intend to use it and pass it on to an editor to check and see how well it does at catching things but so far it seems to pick up on stuff even I didn't pick up on my own (which is saying something considering I catch a half a dozen mistakes in every book I read, including traditionally published novels). I would say it is probably better than any of the services there, though I have only testing grammarly and whitesmoke. It looks for a lot of things important to writers that simply aren't in whitesmoke and grammarly.

[[deleted user]]

I used prowritingaid and it is awesome! It catches so much grammatically and even detects if you're rambling. I recommend it 100%!

[Endash]

Hi guys,

I think I tried nearly all the available proofreading and copy-editing writing programs available.

WhiteSmoke and Grammarly were a real waste of money. They were marketed really well and they looked flashing, but as programs to help you write more clearly, they were terrible. You could actually write a whole paragraph that was grammatically correct, but didn't actually make any sense.

The best proofreading and copyediting program I found was StyleWriter by Editor Software.

I used the previous version on my final year thesis several years back. In the beginning, it would highlight nearly all my text and I would get really angry at it. Then I began to listen to what it was saying, and very quickly my writing style improved immensely.

They now have three StyleWriter editions available; Starter, Standard & Professional. I use the Professional Edition at work as a copywriter, and it still gives me great advice.

Hope that helps :-)

[John]

Just ran across this discussion. As it was starting last November, I was beginning a comparative study of proofreading programs, using real-world texts from published sources. Results show that few of these programs live up to their self-promotional claims.

For example, WhiteSmoke caught 33% of the 366 grammar problems in the test documents but only 13% of the 399 style problems; Grammarly caught 20% and 11%, respectively. Pro Writing Aid caught 15% and 20%. StyleWriter caught 22% and 32%.

Among better performers, Correct English got 29% of the grammar and 24% of the style problems. Interestingly, Word's and Word Perfect's checkers caught 27/18% and 28/11%, respectable results in comparison with the others'.

Anyone interested in the details of this study of 19 proofreading programs can see them at

www.serenity-software.com/pages/compa...

I've refrained from citing the results of our own proofreader, Editor, because they may be suspected of bias. But all the programs were tested using the same documents, so the results of the other programs are reliable comparisons among them.

Our Web page also has a discussion of what text-checking programs can and cannot do and why "perfecting" anyone's writing, as some programs claim to do, is impossible both logically and linguistically.

Good luck to all in the demanding enterprise of writing well!

BTW, We've been around since the 1980s. After StyleWriter first came out, they became interested in us as a competitor and registered the domain name "editor software" before we thought of it. They then began promoting themselves as "Editor Software." As a result, StyleWriter lists first in Google and Bing searches for "Editor software" or "Editor-software," while our Editor lists second. But we're the only proofreading program whose name is simply "Editor."