ProWritingAid Desktop

Even though the Internet, in its what surely seems its "infinite " vastness offers tons of advice on how to improve your writing, the truth is, you can never get too good at it, right?

Regardless of you writing academic, technical, fiction, or just day-to-day stuff, we're sure you'll agree that proofreading or grammar checking is an essential process - if you're aiming for the best possible quality, that is.

Fortunately, there are a few legit alternatives out there that aim to provide advanced editorial services either as web services or as desktop apps, or even both.

ProWritingAid is one such tool that promises enough flexibility to suit any writing style. Marketed mostly as a competent style-checker rather than a hum-drum spell-checker, ProWritingAid brings forth all sorts of technical tools in order to help you save time and focus on the essential parts of your drafts.

However, before we dive deeper into what this app offers (and there's a lot, trust us), it's worth mentioning that ProWritingAid boasts useful integrations with some of the most popular word processors out there such as Microsoft Word, Open Office, Google Docs, and Scrivener.

It supports both Windows and macOS and, it also comes in the form of a Google Chrome extension.

Depending on your experience with similar tools, you may or may not pick up on one of the app's main traits. Without beating around the bush for too long, this app offers a bit more control over the spell-checking and style-checking procedure than, say, Grammarly does.

You'll notice that everything you need is neatly stacked on the app's top toolbar. You're able to check your text for cliches, problematic diction-related passages, repeating phrases and words, sentence and paragraph lengths, and the so-called "sticky sentences". There's also a built-in thesaurus that works surprisingly well.

Better yet, the style checker does wonders, being capable of everything from detecting the misuse of passive verbs, adverbs,  and other things that might affect the overall readability.

This wouldn't be much of a professional tool if it wouldn't bundle tools that keep plagiarism in check. There are also tools that help improve the consistency, pacing, alliterations, and transitions of your style, as mentioned before, all readily accessible from the top toolbar.

Last but not least, the Summary feature deserves a bit of praise as well. Of course, it's aimed at professionals for whom in-depth statistic matter but, oh boy, the level of provided information is staggering.

To end with, we very much liked the app's manual approach towards improving one's writing style, however, some users might prefer a more automated solution instead, which is quite understandable. We have found most of what this app has to offer to be top notch regarding functionality, and it surely is an app worth recommending to anyone who's serious about his/her writing.

This is an app that can indeed build your writing confidence and do most of the spell-checking for you, all while offering various suggestions that might help you grow a bit as a writer.

However, you need to understand that it's not perfect. And we're not talking about a few grammar mistakes that might slip through here and there. What this app can't do is detect all the little subtleties of the English language.