ProWritingAid, A Writer’s Best Editing Friend

ProWritingAid is an essential editing tool

After a month (or two, or three) of writing non-fiction, I’m back at work writing fiction. One of the essential tools I use is ProWriting Aid. I touched on its features briefly in my “R” is for Revising Your Rough Draft blog. I’d like to explain more of why I find it invaluable.

ProWritingAid is more than spelling and  grammar.

Let’s examine its features:

• Writing style checks.
  • Highlights areas where your writing style might be improved, such as use of passive and hidden verbs.
  • Passive verbs:been taught, been raised, was killed. These can change to a more active verb: taught, raised, killed.
  • Hidden verbs:a meeting with can change to meet with; the disappearance of can change to dissapear.
  • Adverb usage inside and outside of dialogue. I tend to keep adverbs inside dialogue as that’s how people talk.
  • Using the same word to start three or more sentences.
• Grammar check. Checks text for grammar errors and potential word misuse.
• Overused word check. Compares the frequency of commonly overused words in text to published writing to give you an indication of where you may be over-using words.
  • ProWritingAid, for example, will suggest you remove 13 of the 33 instances you used “had”.
• Readability.
  • Approximate reading time
  • Points out difficult to read paragraphs.
  • Cliches and Redundancies
• Sticky sentences.
  • Sticky sentences contain a greater-than-normal amount of small articles and words such as”a, head, out, of, the, way” which slows reading.
• Diction, Vague, and Abstract words report
  • • • Diction—ending sentences with a preposition; simplifying words (using “want” instead of “desire”)
      • Vague and Abstract words—it mostly objects to “would, could, some,” but also takes exception to perfectly good words. I mostly ignore this section.

    Other ProWritingAid reports:

  

• Repeats check.
  • Points out when you’ve used a word or phrase more than once.
• Close repeats.
  • Highlights any words or phrases you’ve used more than once in a short space of writing.
• Sentence length check
  • You might want to break up that 43 word sentence.
• Thesaurus
  • By hovering over a word, proWritungAid suggests alternatives
• Dialogue tags check
  • Highlights all dialogue, gives a percentage of dialogue used, and counts how many and of which type of tags.
• Consistency
  • Spelling consistency
  • Hyphenation consistency
  • Straight quotes vs. curly quotes
  • Capitalization consistency (Commander vs commander)
  • Em and en dash use
• Pacing check
  • Identifies slow paragraphs, such as backstory and introspection, so you can spread them out.
• Pronoun use
  • ProWritingAid suggest 4-15% of pronoun usage and <30% of initial pronoun usage (beginning a sentence with a pronoun)
• Alliteration (spaceship in sub-space)
• Homonym
• Transitions. Transitions make it easier for your reader. I fail woefully at transitions.
• House styles. You can set up your own style sheet.
• Plagiarism. This is a paid report.

ProWritingAid is a paid platform at $40 per year. There is a limited FREE version for a 14 day period. I suggest trying the free version first to determine if the software is compatible to you.

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Blessings,

Cheryl

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