ProWritingAid Occasionally Suggests Awful Corrections

I have written well over 100 articles for Kevin’s Guides over the last three years. Most of my articles are quite lengthy and thought out. I’ve written several hundred thousand words for this website, more than the length of The New Testament in the Bible. That’s a lot of writing!

Naturally, I need to check my grammar and writing style to ensure clarity and make my work as polished as possible. I cannot afford a professional editor with the $50 or so in monthly revenue this site generates. So I’ve turned to software to help me. In this post, I’ll review my thoughts on ProWritingAid and point out some major annoyances.

I purchased ProWritingAid a couple of years ago. I extensively tested out the free versions of both Grammarly and ProWritingAid. I actually preferred Grammarly, but ProWritingAid offered a similar suite of features and a lifetime license. I was able to get ProWritingAid’s lifetime license on sale for less than two years of Grammarly Premium. 

Now, I’m not entirely dissatisfied with ProWritingAid. It works well most of the time and catches the vast majority of my simple mistakes. But it also makes idiotic mistakes of its own occasionally. I’ve already met the break-even point and now I’m saving money on writing software at the cost of slightly worse writing output.

Catching Typos
Suggesting Rephrases
Contextual Awareness
Overall Design
Common Grammar Fixes
Value for money

Why I Wrote This Review…

 It’s pretty simple. I was writing the blog post right before this one on web browsers. ProWritingAid incorrectly identified a misused the contraction “they’re” and suggested I replace it with the possessive “their.” This annoyed me a lot. The terms “there”, “they’re”, and “their”, are easily some of the most commonly misused words in the English language. They all sound identical and are spelled similarly. After thirty-some years on Earth, I’ve gotten pretty good at identifying and using the correct one in any situation. So it surprised me when ProWritingAid said I used the wrong one. Then when I realized I was correct, and it was wrong, I thought about how often this type of thing happens with this app. So here I am, writing an essay on why ProWritingAid annoys me.

What It’s Good At

As I said, ProWritingAid isn’t bad. It catches many simple mistakes. For example, I commonly forget to place commas where they belong.

I also mix up the words good and well a lot.

I make at least one typo for every thousand words I write.

I also like a lot of their “readability enhancements” which can reduce some of my redundant wording.

Mostly, ProWritingAid correctly identifies my common issues and suggests the correct changes.

What It’s Bad At

ProWritingAid suffers from the occasional bug in addition to suggesting incorrect corrections… incorrections.

Remembering Exceptions

While you can add words flagged as incorrectly spelled to the dictionary, like brand names and such, you cannot do the same for grammar suggestions. For example, this site is called Kevin’s Guides. That’s spelled correctly. But the word “Guides” is always flagged as an issue with capitalization. This is completely understandable. There’s an option to ignore the suggestion and remove the blue line under the word “Guides.” However, as soon as I reopen the page or type it again somewhere else, I need to ignore it again. There’s no dictionary of ignored terms. It’s not smart enough to recognize that, basically every time I type “Guides” after the word “Kevin’s” – I want it to ignore the capitalization rule. This certainly isn’t a deal breaker for me. I can try to mentally ignore the blue lines, but it is moderately annoying seeing the same incorrect flag a thousand different times over the course of a year.

Inexplicably, sometimes I’ll spell the same thing the same exact way, and ProWritingAid will flag one instance of the issue and not the other. In the same document. So I’ll have two incorrectly flagged “Kevin’s Guides” capitalization problems, and one that doesn’t get flagged. Why?!

 There’s also an option to disable the capitalization rule entirely. But this permanently turns it off for all scenarios. I don’t want that either.

Industry Terms/Conventions

I mostly see this in my guides since I write about technology a lot, but I’m sure the same could be said about the jargon used in many industries. The way things are phrased in tech guides doesn’t always match what might be expected in, say, an academic paper or a news article.

Here are a few examples from a very recent guide I did on a program called Barrier.

  • The first one – “may already run” is a fair suggestion. However, when a program is open or on, I don’t normally say “it runs.” I say it’s running. This indicates that the program may be actively running. Not that it might run or can run. A better suggestion here could be “Note that Barrier may already be open.” 
  • A switch is usually on or off. Not in the one position.
  • We don’t add the word “the” in front of a lot of application names. Facebook used to be called “The Facebook” but now it’s just Facebook.

Bugs/Issues

The thing that bugs me the most about ProWritingAid is the actual bugs in the applications, which can cause poor performance and even application crashes.

The browser extension usually doesn’t give me any major problems. But for years, their extension for Microsoft Office caused Microsoft Word to behave slowly, to the point where Word crashes on my computer and I have to restart the program. I’ve noticed the problem no less than fifty times. My computer is no slouch, and everything is up to date. Recently, it seems the issue has been mostly fixed. But it shouldn’t have taken years!

Barrier’s Chrome extension does not like long sections of text. It seems it stops automatically checking for issues at around 1,000 words. If this is the case, you need to scroll down to the bottom of the text area, click a little dot in the bottom right corner, and tell PWA to check the document. In the case of writing articles for this website, most of them are over this limit. Then, whenever I need to save the document and the page reloads, I have to manually re-enable the check each time. To make it worse, sometimes the little dot spontaneously disappears, making it impossible to check the document without copy/pasting the entire thing into some other editor.

On the completely subjective Kevin rating system, I’d give ProWritingAid a 4/5 for flagging actual issues, 4/5 for value, 2/5 for user experience, and 2/5 for performance and reliability.

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