I was on my final edit. After eighteen months, my next project would finally get some attention. Then I found a homonym error: time bombs in my writing that sit dormant until a keen eyed reader stumbles on them. I needed help finding these little monsters. So I researched editing software for writers. Something that offered more than Microsoft Word’s built in features.
I found twelve different programs, varying in purpose and price. But I couldn’t tell which one might help the most. And a search for reviews didn’t help. So I started testing them.
Instead of dragging you through the logic and holding my conclusions until the end, I’ll give them to you now:
- They can improve your writing.
- My top choice is a tie Autocrit ($96 per year) and ProWritingAid ($35 per year)
- I also suggest an old school program called Editor ($75 to purchase).
Now the logic.
They are worth it
If you are looking for a program that will highlight the errors in your document and, with a click of a button, fix them then hire an editor. These programs require time and effort – work. They give fresh looks at how the words clash and bungle, but you’ll have to rearrange, delete, and research. Maybe an overkill for blogging, but for a contest or material you intend to publish, yes. It will give you a half grade improvement. If you already have an “A” story, that’s a lot. I uncovered overused words, style flaws, and identified a few consistent errors in my writing.
These programs are like your editor: don’t give your story to them until you are finished. Do all your own editing first or you might get bogged down and never finish. And do not place too much value on the feedback. The colored text and bold errors they spit back are for consideration. Some you’ll fix, others are better left in place. On my first pass I almost fell off my chair at all the “errors” on my screen. I felt better after running chapters from my favorite authors through the process. Those texts lit up like Christmas trees too.
Many of these programs started as an impassioned writer striving to improve. It reminded me of the extensive spreadsheets and word macros I wrote to analyze my first book: overused words, common mistakes, and erroneous references. Most of the companies behind them are still small, varying in size based on the outsourcing of any coding. I spoke with many of them and wish I could rate several of them higher because I liked these people. They are eager writers, just like me.
Autocrit and ProWritingAid
For my review, I found twelve programs that looked reasonable. I made a spreadsheet of features, costs, and notes from my testing. Programs fell into two categories: grammar and style. I didn’t find the grammar applications offered enough over what I already get from Microsoft Word. I am not a grammar god, but it was easier to brush up on a few rules than deal with the software. Many of these grammar programs target writers, but a little research suggested they are really designed for those learning or weak in English. I can’t speak on how well they work for that.
Style help, however, was useful and the focus on my comparisons. The frustrating part of testing every program was that I wanted something from most of them. Where one worked better at finding homonyms, another had an easier interface. Deciding which I’d use in my own writing was not easy.
Based on price and features, I recommend Autocrit or ProWritingAid. Both are similar and, depending on your needs, you may prefer one or the other. I don’t suggest Editor as a standalone, but it could make a great companion to either AutoCrit or ProWritingAid.
<td “>If money isn’t an issue, AutoCrit is the way to go. When their Word plugin is available, this will be hard to beat. Especially if it is the same sleek interface they use on the web.
| AutoCrit | ProWritingAid | |
| Web Interface | Both have web interfaces where you copy and paste the text you want analyzed. The web is currently the only way you can use AutoCrit. | |
| Style Analysis | Both programs identify the same types of errors. I found minor differences in some of the reports, but they are close enough I’m calling a tie in this area. | |
| Word Interface | Not Available. Because I don’t want to lose formatting, I had word open on one screen, Autocrit on the other and made changes in Microsoft Word. A Word interface is in the works and will make a huge difference. | Being able to work in Word is a huge benefit and a major reason to consider ProWritingAid. It saved me a lot of time. But you do have to turn off tracking, which I use (a minor drawback). ProWritingAid also has plugins for WordPress. |
| Cost (both offer 14 day money back guarantee) | They have several options and I think the $96 package is adequate (limits you to 8,000 words at a time). The $144 package unlimited. | Hands down winner for cost at $35 for unlimited words. This is a reason to choose ProWritingAid. You can also purchase it outright for $120 – less than the cost of a year of AutoCrit. |
| Interface | The design reminds me of an iPhone app. Simple and easy to use. Intuitive. A check box lets you toggle words and groups of words, instantly changing the highlighting on the screen. This key feature puts AutoCrit on top. | Feels like a program. Reports, menus, clicking. It works and you’ll get the same feedback as AutoCrit, just not with the elegance and ease of use. |
| Grammar | Does not offer Grammar analysis. | Has some limited grammar analysis. It is useful, but not critical in my opinion. Style is where I think most of us need help. |
| Notes | The Cadillac of Editors. It’s hard to walk away from the simple design and ease of use, even with the increased cost. I’m a frugal guy, but their design makes them stand out and saved me time. Even with the lack of a Word plugin. | Found a few more clichés and like it’s algorithm for identifying passive voice. Checks for prepositions ending a sentence. There are buttons constantly asking for feedback – very cool. |
| Conclusion | The savings is worth considering. Especially with the Word Plugin. They are also reworking the interface and we may see massive improvements in the interface this year. | The savings is worth considering. Especially with the Word Plugin. They are also reworking the interface and we may see massive improvements in the interface this year. |
Editor
Editor has a word list report, but I’d stay away from it. Use AutoCrit or ProWritingAid. The Usage reports, however, are excellent for grammar. I liked the homonym, cliché, and tightening features. Not to the point I’d suggest it over AutoCrit or ProWritingAid. But like I said, I’m not focused on grammar. The major flaw of Editor is that the design feels like a flashback to the 80’s. Although it has a word plugin available, it is ancient. In its current form, I also think it is overpriced. The word plugin will walk you through your document, error by error, multiple times. Although this sounds cumbersome, it forced me to look at chapters from new angles. A microcosmic view of each word and sentence. It had some great suggestions and caught some key errors. For that reason, I’m giving it an honorable mention.
One Final Note
These programs do not edit for you. They offer you information so you can fine tune an already excellent document. You do the editing so plan on it taking some time, requiring research, and – if you are like me – keep reference tools hand (dictionary, thesaurus, and grammar rules).
Other Programs
Most of the programs are very similar. I won’t go into details on the others, but here they are along with a few raw notes:
Interface looks nice, has a free full functioning 10 day trial. Has Word plugin. Onetime cost: $67. It’s clean, easy to use. Not so much for grammar, good for style. Runs great in Word. Doesn’t highlight individual words, but easy, however, to jump around and make corrections.
http://www.stylewriter-usa.com/
Word Interface. Free 14 Day Trial. $90 to Purchase basic and $150 for pro. Interesting method. Work in a separate program and have it add comments to your word document. The program feels more outdated than the website looks.
Free version too limited. $95 / year.
https://buy.whitesmoke.com/scs/
Integrates with Word and Outlook. $119/year for Premium, $9.95-14.95 for monthly. 10,000 character limit. I liked how it finds repeated word stems. More for grammar than style.
Grammar checker. $30/month or $140/year. Works with Word and Outlook. Free basic use will point out some errors but ask you to pay to see the rest. Interface is nice.
http://www.writersworkbench.com/wwbinword/wwbmsword.htm
Word Integration. No Free Trial. $120 to buy.
Plain looking interface. Free. All online. Not bad for free.
No trial. Costs $19.95. Wasn’t impressed.
$29.95, no trial. Videos showing off their software are embedded with ads for other products, wasn’t impressed. Did not pursue or test.
If you have a favorite that I missed or additional thoughts, let me know in the comments!
Whoa! Thanks again. PWA was the one that worked for me, but I didn’t buy it — just rented it for a year. Next time I need it, I’ll buy it. (Next time I need it, I hope to have my first novel published.)
Thanks for the research. I’m really going to edit the books this year and call them finished so I can move on even if I don’t pursue publishing.
I heartily endorse the impulse to compare text-checking software, and this site performs a needed service. I’m impressed at the systematic spreadsheet-based comparisons. But the review suffers from most such exercises’ weakness. It does not look below the surface. Trivial example: editminion is judged “not bad for free.” But a few minutes spent on editminion’s website will reveal that its creators are not native speakers of English. Should a native speaker choose them as mentors?
More important is the serious flaw in most evaluations of text checkers, including this one. It has no systematic way of figuring out whether a checker has any real power. The comparative tests we have performed, using published writing as samples, included more than 366 mistakes in grammar–not made-up ones but actual ones made by published US and UK English writers. The most powerful grammar checkers we tested could find only 25-30% of those grammar problems; AutoCrit, one of the two weakest, found 8%; ProWritingAid found 15%.
There’s a psychological trap that’s easy for the tester to fall into. I see it reflected in most online discussions of text checking. Correcting a mistake in one’s writing has positive feedback; many good writers say rewriting to improve their work is their most pleasurable activity. If you run a grammar checker on a sample of your own writing and it finds mistakes, correcting them gives you pleasure.
Running a second checker and correcting more mistakes gives more pleasure. But if you have no idea how many mistakes you have made, chances are that running AutoCrit and ProWritingAid (for example), has left you with 75% or more of your mistakes unidentified and uncorrected. So running any checker on your writing will give some good results, and you will be pleased, but your writing may not be substantially improved.
A serious problem in grammar-checking is that except for the free ones, you don’t often get what you pay for. A notorious example is Grammarly, the most widely advertised and one of the two or three most expensive. In our tests, Grammarly found 20% of the 366 grammatical mistakes, more than AutoCrit and ProWritingAid–but fewer than CorrectEnglish, Grammarian Pro (Mac only), SpellCheckPlus, StyleWriter, WhiteSmoke, or even Word and WordPerfect.
But there’s worse. We took pains to check the programs’ failures, as well as their successes. How many times did they correctly flag a grammatical error but propose a new mistake as a “correction”? How often did they flag a perfectly correct term as a mistake? Here, Grammarly excelled: If we had accepted all of its suggestions, we would have satisfactorily corrected 74 out of the 366 mistakes, but we would also have committed 83 new ones. Our writing would have become worse overall rather than better.
When it comes to style, it’s the Wild West: wordiness, redundancy, clichés, trite expressions, overly formal or pompous diction, empty modifiers, jargon, slang terms, and many other possible problems with style and tone are parts of poor style. Correctness isn’t much of an issue, but quality is. The trouble is that the possible number of stylistic misdemeanors in English is uncountable (how many wordy phrases alone could a busy writer produce?), and they do not conform to programmable rules. A style checker’s ability to find and address them relies primarily on the developer’s collection of examples to compare a text against.
Our test documents included 380 stylistic weaknesses and misdemeanors. Only 2 of the 20 checkers we tested found more than 30% of them. AutoCrit found 8% and ProWritingAid, among the leaders, found 20%. Grammarly found 11%. Word and WordPerfect were no help at all.
I’ve written here at length and probably tried Mr. Henke’s and the reader’s patience. But as an English professor and grammar-checker developer, these issues concern me. Too many writers are paying too much to be so easily deceived. Any text checker will probably find and fix some problems in a writer’s work, but few will do more than skim the surface, and some can make things worse. None of that information is available on their websites, and only comprehensive testing will reveal the differences in quality and performance among them.
BTW, interfaces can be fun, and good programmers can make them so, but good programmers are not the ones who determine the worth of their analyses. I agree that some text-checkers’ interfaces are clunky or plain, but writers who pay for the dazzle may get only what they pay for.
I normally wouldn’t approve such a long comment, especially a self promoting one. I’m going to let this in … for now. I do like the Editor software (author commenting above) but stand by my review. Suggestion: Highlight the word in question during the review process. Would help the process. In my testing, I wasn’t so interested in grammar as style. Mainly overused words and phrases. I found running Editor at the end of my process helpful. It helped me make a few final tweaks. If grammar is your main concern, I definitely suggest looking at Editor. If you want to analyze your word choice, my pick is still AutoCrit or ProWritingAid.
Warren: Sorry you feel my reply was self-serving. I was careful not to mention any software I’m involved in, because I care more about people either misunderstanding or (by promoters) being misled about what text checkers can do. I also addressed the poor state of the art in stylistics. I’m surprised that you think my primary interest is in grammar.
As for highlighting a term in question, whether grammatical or stylistic, our Word interface highlights the sentence so that the writer does not think about changes in isolation from their meaningful contexts. Style checking, in particular, is a matter not of correctness but of appropriateness in context.
Hi Warren, I co-facilitate a writing group in Phoenix, Arizona (Parchment and Prose). Would you mind if I printed a copy of this article for each person in the group (approx. 10 writers of varying abilities)? We’ll be talking about editing techniques at an upcoming meeting and your comparison of the two programs I was going to discuss (AutoCrit and ProWritingAid) would be helpful. Thanks. I look forward to your reply!
Anissa, you bet. Feel free to use the article. I’m glad it can help others 🙂
Thanks so much!
Thanks for sharing this list. I can’t even imagine to write more than 20 pages without making mistakes.