ProWritingAid Review: Is It Good for Novelists? (2024)
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A book editor’s review of ProWritingAid (2024)
Welcome to the next installment in our series on AI-powered editing platforms, where we’ll be doing a ProWritingAid review. (You can find our review of Hemingway Editor App here.)
As I said in my previous review, it seems like AI will be sticking around and carving out a space for itself in the book publishing arena. While there are more AI tools available to the public every day, it’s much harder to know which ones will be beneficial. With these reviews, our goal is to help writers make the best decisions about their work. There are plenty of reviews out there comparing price, ease of use, and features for these platforms. We’ll touch on some of these elements, of course, but what we really wanted to know is how they can serve fiction writers, and especially novelists.
A disclaimer
If you read our previous installment, feel free to jump down to the beginning of the review.
Before I dive in, I want to make it clear that I believe human editors are irreplaceable. No AI that we’ll be discussing will be capable of what a good human editor can do for you. Perhaps you’re thinking, Well, of course you feel that way. You’d like to keep your job. And you’d be right to think so. I feel honored to work with authors for my job, and I’d like to continue doing it! Writing stories is an extremely human, enormously intricate process of imagination, creativity, and technical ability, and that means that human feedback on what’s produced is essential.
We highly encourage you to seek out other people when it comes to getting feedback on your work—critique partners, a trusted friend, a reliable reader, an editor. As we well know, however, finding good critique partners is easier said than done, and friends and family often don’t have the time to read. Readers may not have the skills to help you improve, and you may not have the resources to hire a professional editor.
These various circumstances make AI an appealing alternative—especially for indie authors looking to keep costs low—and the two of us here at Ground Crew Editorial want to help you navigate your options, giving you our perspective on each of these platforms from our editorial viewpoint.
As always, our goal is to help you develop in your craft.
Our method
For these reviews, I’ll be using a quite old fantasy short story of Jackie’s as a base text. I first performed my own edits on it (developmental, line, and copy editing), and I’ll be comparing the AI platform’s feedback to my own. I’ll be touching primarily on three areas:
· Type and quality of feedback—What levels of editing can this program give you? Is it good at what it does? Are the suggestions useful?
· User experience—Is it easy to use? How much control does the user have? Is this geared towards beginners or writing experts?
· External factors—What are the terms of service for using this platform? Is the work stored or shared with others?
ProWritingAid Review
ProWritingAid is an editorial platform that describes itself as “a company run by writers.” I’d seen discussions and recommendations for ProWritingAid in many of the sci-fi and fantasy circles I’m in, and I was curious to see how it stacked up. It offers an almost bewildering amount of reports that you can run on your writing, such as diction checks (looking for vague words and places that can be simplified) and the frequency of different sentence starts. It also includes rewrite suggestions and many AI tools for rephrasing, adding dialogue, adding emotion or sensory details, and more.
Once you have text in the app, you can tell ProWritingAid what kind of writing you’re working on. In my case, I was able to tell it that this was a creative document, and specifically that it was fantasy. Specifying the kind of writing will cause ProWritingAid to reevaluate the automatically run checks and generate a new report for you. This report gives you a percentage score on a wide variety of areas, like grammar score, spelling score, style score, slow pacing, complex paragraphs, emotions tells, etc.
Based on the type of writing, ProWritingAid assigns an ideal percentage for you to aim for. For example, grammar and spelling should always be 100% with no errors. The style score, however, recommends being at 80% or higher. The score for unusual dialogue tags recommends being at less than 30%. As you make corrections, you can work closer to being in the recommended range. I later learned you can set a preferred author to check your work against (for this fantasy short story, I tried to set Brandon Sanderson as the preferred author, but I couldn’t get the setting to save).
AI features called Sparks offer suggestions for adding emotion details, expanding or condensing sentences, enhancing readability, and more. The feature I was most interested in was the feedback option, which promised AI critique on writer strengths, the plot, characters, style/voice, and clarity. These critiques also offer recommendations for potential improvements.
The free version of ProWritingAid offers access to many of the checks. For my review, I tried out the Premium subscription, which gave more advanced suggestions and allowed me to play with the AI features.
I will doing a deep dive into the features of this platform with lots of examples, so heads up—this post will be a longer read than usual! If you want the TL;DR version of this ProWritingAid review, see below.
Our review: short and sweet
ProWritingAid is the most suitable for novelists looking for assistance with mechanical issues in their prose that fall under line editing. While I appreciate the careful wording that makes it clear that many items that the platform brings to your attention may be a problem rather than giving an ultimatum that it must be changed, these checks give writers hundreds, if not thousands, of suggestions and data points to review. Many of the issues I reviewed were not errors or problems, so there is a substantial amount of work to do to determine what actually needs attention. I found ProWritingAid’s Critique to be generic, and the Sparks I tested out seem more likely to weaken your storytelling than improve it.
Getting into the edit
Developmental capabilities
Of all ProWritingAid’s features, the critique feature was the one I was most curious about. With the Premium subscription, users are allowed one critique per day on 4,000 words. Keep in mind that this meant that I couldn’t get a critique on the complete short story (5,000 words). The critique begins with a disclaimer that lets you know that the critique is generated by an AI model that has been guided by a human editor, that it is not intended as a replacement for a human beta reader or editor, and that it may contain errors or inaccuracies. It also reminds the user that the critique only covers 4,000 words, so if you want critique on longer sections, you’ll need to select specific sections and run multiple checks.
I first ran the critique feature when I had the free version, which gives you a mostly redacted edition of the critique, with only a list of strengths, a plot summary, and recommendations for potential improvements. I then upgraded to the Premium version and ran the critique again. The next day, I ran the critique a third time to compare the results.
Developmental editing is an extremely complex task, and I have a pretty high standard when it comes to what counts as good and useful feedback. While AI can blaze through tasks that follow rules, reading is an activity that doesn’t follow such neat rules. A story is communication between the author and the reader, with the experience of reading shaped by a joint effort of the author’s words and the reader’s own powers.
As I get into the nuts and bolts of the generated critique, keep in mind that AI cannot read. It can look for patterns, count, predict the most likely word or phrase, and correlate certain elements with assigned understandings (such as long sentences indicating slow pacing). But it does not bring personal experience to a text, nor is it capable of engaging with the words. Most importantly, it assembles information but does not create meaning. As we move further into this era of AI-generated text, I think a key distinction that we should consider is the distinction between communication as the transmission of information vs. the transmission of meaning—though that’s a discussion for another day. Simply put, AI is not a reader.
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I wanted to run the critique several times to compare the results. I ran the critique on the unmodified story each time to see how the report might change.
Overall, I found the critiques to be generic and unhelpful. The reports were generally very positive. Between the three critiques, the reports gave this praise:
The writing effectively creates a strong sense of atmosphere and setting. The world is vivid and immersive. The setting and scenes come alive and add depth. (My favorite bit of feedback was how the opening was engaging, immediately establishing “a sense of coldness and danger.”)
Characters are distinct, well-developed, and believable, and they have clear motivations and personalities. They are intriguing, and they have unique qualities and backgrounds.
Writing style is engaging and brings the narrative to life.
Pacing is effective in building tension and keeping the reader engaged. The suspenseful plot drives the narrative forward.
Plot structure is clear and engaging.
On its face, this critique indicates a perfect short story. What writer wouldn’t be thrilled to receive this kind of a report? However, I knew going in that this short story needed work. Jackie let me use this one for our reviews because it was one she’d written quite a while ago and she’d decided to move on to other stories instead of revising this one. So I moved on to the suggested improvements:
Provide more specific details and descriptions.
Develop character motivations: provide more insight into the characters’ motivations and emotional complexity to deepen their development.
Enhance setting descriptions: provide more vivid and sensory details to fully immerse the reader.
Tighten pacing: Balance the amount of backstory and action to ensure the story maintains a consistent pace and keeps the reader engaged.
What is a writer to make of critique like this, where they are praised for writing a vivid and immersive world, and then they’re told that they need more vivid details to immerse their reader? It says their pacing is effective and driving, and then they’re told to work on tightening their pace? A stark contrast appeared in the Clarity/Cohesion section between critique two and three:
Critique Two:
The writing is clear, and the ideas are logically connected. The narrative flows smoothly, allowing the reader to follow the story without confusion.
Critique Three:
The writing is generally clear and ideas are logically connected. However, there are some moments where the writing could benefit from clearer transitions between scenes and a more explicit explanation of certain details. Additionally, the dialogue could be more concise and focused to enhance clarity. Overall, the writing could be further polished to improve clarity and cohesion.
There were other mystifying suggestions, mostly cryptic due to their lack of specificity:
Provide additional context and backstory for the world to further engage the reader. (What does giving context or backstory for a world look like? Does the writer have time for that in a short story?)
Clarify certain details: Provide clearer explanations for certain plot points and elements of the story to avoid confusion. (Which plot points and story elements?)
Consider incorporating more dialogue to further develop the relationships between the characters and add depth to their interactions. (The main character in this story is mute, so dialogue is necessarily limited. She writes out her dialogue.)
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One point we agreed on
One of the critiques did bring up a suggestion to develop the relationship between the main character and her business partner, a suggestion that I also had from my own developmental edit on the story. I wanted to know more about why they were working together, how long they’d been hunting treasure, and what kind of relationship they had.
Where we diverged
In my own edit of the story, I made notes about the need to amplify the tension. The characters are trying to find a treasure before the Scourges (faceless shadow monsters) catch up with them. They know they’re being followed and that they can’t outrun the Scourges, but the tension isn’t nearly as high as it should be, and they also don’t seem to have a plan about what they’re going to do when the Scourges catch up.
Other notes I made concerned needing more information about the main character’s job as a Scribe (the reason she’s can no longer speak), making it clear why the antagonist needed the main character and her partner for the treasure hunt when he seems capable of finding it on his own, and suggesting that the main character’s estrangement from her home be highlighted. The climax of the story involves her choosing to identify again with her people, so it would have more impact if the reader could see her separation from that identity much more clearly early on.
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While I ran each of these checks on an unrevised document, the structure of these critiques (and their contradictory and sometimes vague nature) would easily lend themselves to a never-ending loop. Could a writer ever reach a point when there were no more potential improvements to suggest? How would they know if they’d effectively made changes to address previous critiques?
Some of the recommended changes are linked to the errors/concerns that ProWritingAid flags for the writer; for example, if I spent some time in the transitions check panel, I could probably address the clarity/cohesion feedback. However, much of the feedback is given without recommendations about how to proceed. Saying “clarify certain points” without information about which specific points are unclear does not serve the writer.
Also, knowing that the critique doesn’t cover the full story—meaning that it wasn’t including the climax and conclusion of the story—made me doubt the feedback even more. In the structure of a short story, the “point” of the story, or the essential experience that the writer is intent on creating, is usually only understood at the end. For novelists, this limited feedback means that, at best, you could have it look at a single scene. As for getting feedback on how that scene works within the larger story, that’s far beyond ProWritingAid’s scope.
But I don’t consider this a failing—I did not expect that the AI could provide what a reader can. Keep in mind that the platform itself tells you that this feedback isn’t meant to replace a human reader or editor, and that it may contain errors and inaccuracies. If you are considering using the platform for developmental work, I would encourage you to be realistic about the tools that are presented for your use and be aware of their limitations.
Line editing capabilities
Walking you through all of ProWritingAid’s features and reports would take days (and that’s no exaggeration!), so I’ll just cover just a few of the ones that I tried for this review. You can click on the headings below to break out the discussion of each one.
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ProWritingAid uses a concept called “glue words” that was new to me. Glue words are the opposite of “working words,” which convey meaning to reader and contain the sentence’s essential information. Glue words make the working words stick together. They don’t carry much meaning in and of themselves, but they are necessary to complete the sentence (words like “the,” “and,” “from,” etc.). When a sentence has too many identified glue words in it, ProWritingAid flags it as a sticky sentence and gives you a glue index indicating the percentage of glue words. (Side note: the word “glue” has officially ceased to have meaning for me as I write this review.) Sticky sentences can indicate different problems, such as needlessly complex sentences, backloaded sentences, or including too many points or nonessential information.
This is a check that could be very helpful for certain writers while line editing, but I will add a caveat to that recommendation. Reducing the stickiness of a sentence always involves condensing a sentence, and if a writer gets too focused on reducing glue words, they will most certainly run the risk of losing their writing voice. Clarity is great, but an entire story told with short, focused sentences isn’t necessarily a good time.
In the short story, I looked at a few sticky sentences that were flagged and the suggestions to fix them.
Original: She didn’t want to think about home, how long she had been gone.
Suggestion: She avoided thoughts of home and the length of her absence.
Original: She had to do this, no matter how difficult it was.
Suggestion: Regardless of the difficulty, she had to do it.
In both of these instances, I don’t see a noticeable improvement in the suggestion. If anything, the suggestions sound stiff or more formal. ProWritingAid’s guide to sticky sentences says that the writer is the one in control and you don’t have to change sticky sentences if you don’t want to. This is a good reminder to keep at the front of your mind if you’re using this check.
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I got more results for the cliché check when I ran it with the Premium subscription, but the results were not terribly helpful. It flagged the three words “in the darkest” and the single word “ginger.” It is neat that they distinguish between clichés in dialogue and outside of dialogue (after all, people often speak in clichés), but I’m not sure it has a good sense of what a cliché is based on what it brought up for me.
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I thought this check was rather good. It counts the number of times a sentence begins with a pronoun, as well as the number of pronouns in the document as a whole. Checking for initial pronouns would be especially helpful for writers telling their story in the first person, where it can be so easy to begin with “I.” Keeping track of pronouns elsewhere is also a good idea, as too many pronouns can bog down a sentence as well (like “She went to the window, where she watered her houseplants with her tiny watering can”).
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This check is another one that is pretty cool. It counts the number of words in each sentence and then displays the story visually with bars of varying lengths. At a glance, you can see your sentence variety, or lack thereof, as the case may be. This would make it easy to check things like pacing (do the action scenes have shorter sentences?) and make sure that there aren’t too many long, meandering sentences.
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This check looks at the frequency of your use of different sentence starts and compares them with published texts in your genre. For instance, the story I was working on had 75% of the sentence start with a subject, compared to 72% in published writing. It had 6% start with an adverb, as opposed to 9% in published writing. There were several sentence starts that this short story didn’t have, such as starting with a gerund, an infinitive, and a coordinating conjunction. For these, ProWritingAid says, “You might want to consider adding some.” I appreciate the “up to you” attitude, but there seems to be an assumption here that variety is a good thing simply for its own sake, and that you should pay attention to where you’re not matching up with published texts even in this fairly granular way. I do agree with the platform that varied sentence structures are a very good idea and do help readers stay engaged, but making sure that you sprinkle in each kind of sentence structure isn’t an absolute must, nor does it guarantee better quality writing. This check would be useful to see if you rely too much on certain sentence structure, but for fairly balanced writing, I don’t think the fine-tuning it suggests with the percentages would be necessary for most writers.
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I really liked the idea of this check, which purported to list words associated with the five senses. Most writers have one sense that they lean hardest on (and for most, it is sight), so having a way to see which ones are not well represented in your writing could be very helpful. In this short story, sight was the top sense, followed by touch, then sound, and then taste and smell at the bottom. Once I started digging into the results, though, I started to see that the platform doesn’t have a great way of distinguishing true sense words. For example, under taste, it brought up two instances of the word “sharp,” both of which described weapons rather than taste. It also brought up “bitter” (describing the weather) and “rich” (describing wealth). It didn’t mention the ginger tea from the beginning (the cliché ginger).
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I tried out the AI suggestions for a few paragraphs that ProWritingAid flagged as being slow paced. While the check says that these are typically paragraphs with introspection or backstory, here are two paragraphs it brought to my attention:
Example 1: She sighed, shoving frustration behind her. She had to do this, no matter how difficult it was.
Example 2: She whipped off her pack and wrote furiously, picking and choosing from the language she had.
As well as the single sentence: That had been quite the conversation.
For writers who have trouble with info-dumping or including too much backstory, this could be a valuable check, but this is another check that brings up a lot of potential issues to check with very few of them actually needing attention.
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When I selected the rephrase check, it highlighted every single sentence in the story, which made me laugh out loud. Of course every sentence has the possibility of being rephrased. That’s the beauty of language! But I’m not sure how helpful it is to suggest that every sentence could be reworded. I tried out the “Suggest Rephrases” button. Here are few examples:
Original: The Winter Wards were cruel in the darkest months, bitter and biting, and Ask was a stranger to them.
Suggestion: Ask was unfamiliar with the cruel and biting Winter Wards during the darkest months.
Suggestion: The Winter Wards, merciless and frigid, were a foreign concept to Ask.
Original: The cold was making her brittle.
Suggestion: She became fragile due to the cold.
Suggestion: Her brittleness increased as a result of the cold.
In these examples, the suggestions either change the meaning of the sentence or don’t add much improvement.
I was impressed to see that in one instance of passive voice, the change it suggested combined two sentences together to eliminate the passive wording. However, in another instance of passive voice, the suggestion changed a different verb and kept the passive voice (the bold shows the passive voice and changed verb):
Original: The bargain was already set, and she was too cold to argue besides, so she curled her stiff fingers into the sign he’d taught her that meant “Good.”
Suggestion: The bargain was already set, and she was too cold to argue besides, so she formed her stiff fingers into the sign he had taught her that meant “Good.”
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The Sparks are AI tools to help writers with heavier lifting. ProWritingAid offers a pretty incredible range of options. Under the Continue Sparks, you highlight certain parts of your text and choose things like Continue writing, Continue action, Emotion detail, Sensory detail, Analogy, Counterargument, Emphasize, Joke, Quote, and Explanation. You can also use Sparks to rephrase for readability, fluency, transitions, condense or expand, or change to first or third person perspective. These are obviously not all useful for every kind of writing, and I didn’t have time to try them all. I tried three of the Continue Sparks to see what it would give me.
Original: “What interests are those?” Renovar asked. “If you forgive my asking.”
“Oh, ones we share, naturally,” Parras said with an oily smile that didn’t fit into his face. “If there is profit in it, that knowledge is worth having, wouldn’t you agree?”
Continue writing: Renovar raised an eyebrow, intrigued by Parras’ response. He sensed an ulterior motive behind his words. “Profit, you say? Well, that depends on the nature of these shared interests,” Renovar replied cautiously.
Parras chuckled, his smile growing wider. “Ah, my dear Renovar, you’re a perceptive one. These interests of ours revolve around opportunities for financial gain. We both understand the value of knowledge and its potential to bring us wealth.”
Renovar’s suspicion deepened, but he maintained his composure. “While I appreciate the importance of financial gain, I also believe in pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Profit should not be the sole driving force behind one’s interests”…
I’ll stop there since you can get the idea, but this went on for some time. In total, it wrote me about 500 words of wheel-spinning. The conversation goes nowhere, the same questions and points being made with slightly different words and trite or melodramatic phrasing. On a structure level, the conversation it wrote for me is a tennis match conversation (no interruptions, both men reacting physically or mentally first before speaking), and each paragraph begins with a character’s name. Almost all of the first lines have the same sentence structure, too, with the main sentence being followed by a participial:
Renovar weighed Parras’ words carefully, sensing the underlying hunger…
Parras’ smile faltered for a moment, his eyes narrowing…
Renovar nodded, his mind swirling…
Here’s another example, using the emotion detail Spark for a few lines taken from the climax:
Original: Renovar caught her arm. “You all right? I’ve never seen you write so fast, except maybe when I threw out your old boots,” he finished, smiling.
She formed “good” with her fingers, in no mood for his joking, but he said, “Are you sure?”
Continue emotion detail: Renovar could see the tension in her body, her arm trembling slightly under his touch. Her fingers, still forming the sign for “good,” lacked their usual precision. The rapid movement of her hand had left her fingertips slightly red, evidence of the urgency with which she had written.
He could sense that she was not in the mood for his playful banter. Her expression remained stoic, her eyes focused on the ground. But Renovar could see through her facade. He knew her well enough to recognize the signs of frustration and irritation that lingered beneath the surface.
Concern etched across his face as he asked once again, “Are you sure?” His voice held a note of genuine worry, his smile fading into a more serious expression. Renovar knew that her emotions were running deep, and he wanted to make sure she had the support she needed.
As she looked up at him, her eyes softened momentarily, a brief glimpse of vulnerability shining through. She nodded, a mixture of gratitude and resignation on her face. It was clear that she appreciated his concern, even if she wasn’t ready to fully open up about what was bothering her.
Renovar squeezed her arm gently before releasing it. He understood that sometimes, words weren’t enough, and that his presence alone could provide some comfort. He stood by her side, ready to offer support whenever she was ready to share her burden.
As you might expect, the emotion detail can’t capture characterization that’s accurate to your characters, so the body language a Spark suggests is not likely to match. The beats of this moment are very expected (her looking up at him, a brief glimpse of vulnerability, him squeezing her arm). This writing also shifts into the wrong perspective so that this is told from Renovar’s perspective rather than the main character, who until this point in the story has been the subject of the story’s limited third-person POV.
And we’ll do one more. I wanted to try the Continue dialogue option since writing conversations can be challenging.
Original: Ask let Renovar hold her, and when the burning eased, she nodded and smiled, forming “good” with her fingers.
They had to keep moving. The other Scourges would be there soon, and the two of them couldn’t fight all of them off, not with Ask so exhausted.
Continue dialogue: Ask: (panting) Renovar, I need you to hold her for a moment. The burning... it’s too much.
Renovar: (concerned) Of course, Ask. Give her to me.
(Ask hands the baby over to Renovar, and the burning sensation slowly subsides. Renovar cradles the baby gently.)
Ask: (nodding, smiling weakly) Thank you, Renovar. I can feel it easing now. We need to keep moving though, they’ll be here soon.
Renovar: (determined) You’re right, Ask. We can’t stay here. We’ll find a safe place for the baby. We can’t fight them all off in our current state.
Ask: (exhausted) Agreed. Let’s go, Renovar. We have to protect her at all costs.
This one came completely out of left field. Not only can our mute character now speak, there’s a baby! And the writing has also shifted to present tense and a style that’s closer to a micromanaging film script than a short story.
All in all, I would encourage writers to use a lot of caution with the Sparks, if not avoid them altogether. AI-generated writing is based on predictive patterns, which means that what it creates for you will be the most expected idea or phrase associated with what you’ve highlighted for it to expand on. In the case of the Continue dialogue example, I’m sure many of the sentences it’s been trained on that show a character letting someone else “hold her” are about babies, which is where we get our sudden alternate reality. And of course, your goal is to write scenes that are original and unique to your story and your style, so these Sparks will most likely only create more work for you rather than help.
Copy editing capabilities
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This check looks for vague and abstract words, as well as looking for overused words. Some writers may find this helpful, but for Jackie’s short story, it was not all that useful. It brought up “like” as a vague word, but both times it was in the construction of a simile, such as describing a breeze slipping by the main character “like a pickpocket.” It also brought up “all” in the phrases “all too well” and “as with all their prospects,” neither of which are instances I would consider too vague.
ProWritingAid doesn’t like the word “some,” which can be vague in certain instances, but in others is fitting. Take this sentence for example: She tried to pull Renovar aside to confide some of her concerns in him… The suggestions were to replace “some” with “the,” “this,” or “that,” none of which will work here.
In another place, it flagged “sort of”: …the sort of tracks the Scourges might have expected to find.” It suggested “fairly,” “rather,” or “somewhat.” Again, these replacements don’t suit the context.
In other places, it suggested ways to simplify the wording for easier reading, such as changing “previous commissioners” to “earlier commissioners” and “want” or “wish" instead of “desire.”
It also flagged a possible double negative, but it was looking at the last word of one sentence and the first word of the next: …have this treasure or not. Unfortunately, the Scourges…
As you can see, the platform does a lot of work to bring things to the writer’s attention, but many of them are not errors, creating a lot of busywork.
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This is perhaps the greatest busywork check in ProWritingAid. Encouraging you to “experiment with alternative nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs to enhance your vocabulary,” it gives you a list of certain types of words, notes how many times you’ve used each one, and gives you the chance to look up each one for other words. I think it’s safe to say anyone—even an editor like me—would be daunted at working through a list of 286 adjectives, 801 nouns, 828 verbs, and 176 adverbs to make sure they’re all unique.
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ProWritingAid is stellar at catching unnecessary “thats” (I’ll admit, overusing “that” is a personal struggle for me), and the echoes check is a helpful way to see where words or phrases have been reused, things that are so hard to see in your own writing. There is also a very handy feature where you can add terms to a custom dictionary for your project, as well as update a personal style guide so that you can teach the platform to ignore certain rules you prefer to break. However, as with other features, I found that the platform generated many potential copy editing errors for my review that weren’t errors.
In one place, it suggested that a serial comma was missing, but the sentence it highlighted wasn’t a list.
It highlighted two dialogue tags as being in present tense (and therefore not matching the rest of the story in past tense), but they were past tense.
It flagged the phrase “without so much as rustle” as a possible wrong verb form, but the error is that the article “a” is missing.
It didn’t know the word “fletched.”
It didn’t catch that “snowdrift” should be one word.
It said that the adjective “year-round” shouldn’t be hyphenated when it follows a noun, but “year-round” in this instance is an adverb, so the hyphen should stay.
User experience
Overall, ProWritingAid is very intuitive to use, and it’s clear that the creators are focused on supporting writers with a wide variety of tools. As you can see from my drive-by survey, there are dozens of tools and reports that writers can try out, and I certainly didn’t have time to give each one a shake. While I was double-checking something while writing this review, I found the Word Explorer tool in the main menu, which brought up a whole other tool I hadn’t seen where you can look up a word and you can not only get the definition but also look at the thesaurus, reverse dictionary, lists, alliteration, cliches, spelling, rhymes, common phrases, anagrams, and more. It has a truly bewildering amount of functions!
The platform allows a lot of customization, such as choosing a favorite author to check your work against, specifying the type of writing you’re working on, and building personal style guides. I haven’t even touched on the community aspect of ProWritingAid, but they also offer frequent webinars and regular blog posts about genres and writing craft.
Extensive explanations
ProWritingAid includes an explanation for every check that the platform can run, which really is a great way for writers to understand the reasoning behind the suggestions. In many instances, there is also an accompanying video. Having explanations for the changes is a great way for you to learn the ropes for yourself. It is also a good way to put control back into your hands. When you understand what’s being identified as a “problem,” you can decide if it’s something you’re going to change or not, being confident in your choice.
Limited scope
The free version of ProWritingAid works on a very limited amount of text—only 500 words—and while it’s totally understandable (they’re running a business, after all!), the real functionality can’t be unlocked unless you pay for a subscription. Even with the paid subscription, the critique feature is still limited to 4,000 words, and the FAQ says that ProWritingAid works best with documents under 10,000 words. From my reading about how other writers use it in their process, they break their novels into small pieces and run them through individually. For those wanting to use the critique feature and the other AI tools, these writers have to break up their work over several days. The Premium subscription only allows one critique per day and five Sparks (3 critiques and fifty Sparks per day for Premium Pro). It’s possible to make it work for a novel, but it does require some elbow grease.
The sheer amount of it all
ProWritingAid is indeed a powerful platform with the most functionality that I’ve seen so far in my review of AI editing platforms. This is certainly a factor that recommends it, but I would say that it’s also a drawback. Not every writer will need every tool that it offers—much less have enough time to make full use of it. I can see why they offer the option to select specific checks that you’d like to run.
The sheer amount of suggestions and checks that it gives you to work through is staggering, and many of them (at least in my trial run) didn’t actually need any attention. For every good suggestion or helpful flag, there were easily twenty-odd or more that I would have ignored. Editing your own work always involves myriad decisions, naturally, but using a platform like this gives a writer an intimidating workload. It takes only a few seconds for ProWritingAid to generate these reports, but it took me several hours to sift through the reports on a 5,000-word short story—and I was mainly just looking at the reports rather than making changes. My own perspective as an editor makes me biased on this count, but I can objectively say that a human editor will only draw your attention to issues that need to be addressed, not all the issues that might need to be addressed.
External factors (a.k.a. I read the Terms and Conditions so you don’t have to)
I was very impressed with ProWritingAid’s straightforward Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy. ProWritingAid is UK-based, which is far ahead of the US in terms of protecting citizens’ data and privacy. They have a dedicated Trust Center where they explain the security of their systems, including diagrams to show how information is transmitted through their systems. For writers who prefer not to save their documents online, ProWritingAid offers a desktop version so that files are only stored on your computer.
ProWritingAid states that they do not train their AI on user content and that they used texts corrected by professional copy editors to ensure that the training data for their model is of the highest quality. They are very upfront that they do not share user text or use it for any other purposes. After the analysis of the writing is complete, the record of the text is removed from their servers.
ProWritingAid states it is extremely unlikely that the Sparks suggestions would contain plagiarized text because of the way they are created (generative AI that created word by word). However, they still follow this up with a recommendation to use a plagiarism checker on “writing you’ve created yourself, and any writing you’ve generated or edited using an AI tool.”
Though it’s clear that they take security seriously, ProWritingAid makes no guarantee that the services will be secure, and they are not liable for anything, including unauthorized access to your data or loss of data. As with any online service, use is at the user’s own risk.
Conclusion
Most novelists will be able to find some helpful functions among the vast array available with ProWritingAid, though I believe that the true challenge with this platform is sifting the large amounts of information it gives you. Like other AI editing platforms, short, punchy text is prized—at the expense of voice and sometimes meaning—so writers should always keep that in mind when they’re working on their writing. It has some useful features that simplify otherwise tedious tasks, like offering a visual representation of the length of every sentence in the document, counting how many sentences start with “I,” and identifying unnecessary “thats” and word/phrase repeats. Depending on your particular weaknesses, other checks could be very beneficial, such as overused words, adverb counts, and unusual dialogue tags.
Writers using this platform should also resist the idea that aligning their text with the ideal percentages will make their text perfect. To function, AI editing platforms must necessarily translate a lot of nuanced and abstract concepts into data that can be analyzed, which means that writers using AI with their work are working in a system that’s been simplified and mechanized. Writers should always feel confident in their storytelling, even if it means going against the advice of the platform because, in short, they have expertise and understanding that the AI cannot have in language, of story craft, of emotion, and, of course, life itself.
From my own experience and reading other reviews, it seems ProWritingAid is not an ideal grammar checker, so I would not recommend using it for that function alone. I would also not recommend using it only for the Critique function as the critiques are very limited and, at least at this time, prone to offer contradictory advice.
Ultimately, ProWritingAid’s limited scope for word counts makes it inconvenient for working on novels, but for those determined to use it, there are ways to work around it as well as get some beneficial feedback on smaller sections of writing.
Of the editing platforms out there that I’ve seen, ProWritingAid seems genuinely committed to the writing community, and their dedication to keeping users’ content secure shows that they understand many of the fears out there writers have about using platforms like this.
While it is far from perfect, some novelists will find it a useful toolkit in revising their manuscripts.
Have more questions?
There’s a lot of info here, so if you’re still processing or have more questions, I’m happy to chat anytime at ariane[at]groundcreweditorial[dot]com.
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