Grammarly vs ProWritingAid: A Writer’s View on Which to Choose

“ProWritingAid and Grammarly have their strengths and weaknesses. Using both gives me a stronger piece,” says Kammi.

I can’t think of a good reason for Dan’s position since ProWritingAid’s plugin works seamlessly on email and social media platforms (more on this later). But inspired by Kammi, I decided to see if combining both software for thorough editing is beneficial. 

The text below is an excerpt from an email I recently sent. I fed it to ProWritingAid and Grammarly and examined the results.

“…What matters to me is the motive of the person giving the feedback. If I’m convinced their motives are pure, I’ll take no offense even when the delivery seems harsh and insensitive. I’m mature enough to look beyond any hurtful comments and carefully consider their advice.”

Grammarly suggested I replace “motives” with “reasons.” It also recommended I delete “any.” I disagree with the first suggestion. “Motives” more accurately conveys my intended message. But I agree that “any” is redundant.

When I ran the exact text through ProWritingAid, it didn’t flag “motives” or “any,” But as you can see below, it flagged “carefully consider” and suggested alternatives.

I agree the sentence reads better when I replace “carefully consider”  with “ponder.”

Here’s the post-edit version of the statement:

“What matters to me is the motive of the person giving the feedback. If I’m convinced their motives are pure, I’ll take no offense even when the delivery seems harsh and insensitive. I’m mature enough to look beyond hurtful comments and ponder on their advice.”

Much better, right? However, I think combining both tools is a bad idea. They would be a time suck and increase your fees if you’re on the premium version of both tools.

Verdict: It’s a tie. ProWritingAid provides helpful suggestions that improve your writing, but not enough to make it significantly more accurate than Grammarly.

Customization Options

Grammarly gives considerable autonomy in customizing the suggestions you receive. For starters, its Set Goals feature ensures you receive writing suggestions tailored to the audience and context of your content. 

An academic paper, for instance, requires a formal writing tone. So using contractions or slang in this type of writing would be inappropriate.

Grammarly can help you catch informal language in your text if you set your Domain to Academic or Formality to Formal. Here’s an example:

Beyond these goal-based suggestions, you can activate or deactivate specific suggestions using Suggestions Management on Grammarly’s Editor Settings. For instance, you can turn off its “Avoid passive voice” feature, as seen in the image below:

Grammarly also lets you create style guides, a valuable feature for businesses or agencies with multiple writers. This feature is exclusive to Grammarly Business subscribers.

The beauty of Grammarly is that it provides just enough options to help you feel in control, but not too much that you feel overwhelmed. Conversely, ProWritingAid features extensive customization options that could overwhelm a writer.

Like Grammarly, ProWritingAid lets you set your writing style and receive context-specific suggestions. But ProWritingAid gets a leg up because it has more writing styles. Plus, its Style Guide feature is available to all paid users.

As shown in the image above, ProWritingAid writing styles are General, Academic, Business, Technical, Creative, Causal, Web, and Script. Each of these styles has sub-categories. So when you click on Business, for instance, you can choose the option that best fits your audience and goal.

Whereas Grammarly’s customization settings are universal, ProWritingAid sometimes lets you choose the document type to which you apply a customization rule. For instance, passive voice usage is common in academic writing. So you can set it to avoid passive voice in all documents except academic writing. 

These extra details make ProWritingAid clunkier. But some writers (like me) appreciate the detail.

Verdict: ProWritingAid wins for extensive customization options.

Analysis Reports of Grammarly and ProWritingAid

Grammarly’s analysis report is basic at best. It includes your average sentence length, a readability score based on the Flesch Kincaid scale, and a bar indicating how your key metric compares to your other Grammarly users globally.

Grammarly also emails you a summary of these insights at the end of every week. Call me vain, but I pat myself on the back when Grammarly lets me know my week was more productive than 93% of its users. 

The weekly email also contains three top mistakes I made in the previous week. That way, I discover and fix my bad writing habits. To access Grammarly’s analysis report, click Overall Score on the top right side of the web editor. 

Analysis reports are where ProWritingAid best shines. Its summary report gives a detailed overview of your performance across 20+ categories, including grammar, style, readability, and sentence variety. The screenshot below cannot capture its true extent. For instance, this sample report actually spans an impressive 26 pages when printed.

ProWritingAid also provides detailed reports on each writing category. Click the corresponding skill area in the Reports toolbar to access a report. The reports I often use are: 

• Style Report: Highlights areas of your writing that you can revise to enhance readability. This includes passive voice, style improvements, nominalised verbs, and whatnots.
• Sticky Sentences Report: Flags sentences with too many glue words — like from, and, but, to, and in — prompting you to eliminate the stickiness and clarify your sentences.
• Repeats Report: Highlights frequently repeated phrases in your writing because repeating the words weakens your writing.
• Sensory Report: Highlights words that make the reader feel they are in the scene. For instance, if words like illuminate, foggy, crisp, and grasp dominate your writing, this report emphasizes your focus on sight and touch. So you may consider infusing words that appeal to the remaining three senses; sound, smell, and taste.
• Cliché Report: Helps you catch stale phrases and redundancies.
• Structure Report: Compares the structure of your writing with published articles in your industry. You can also use its Author Comparisons feature to compare your favorite author’s writing with yours.

What’s more, the bottom of each report includes a “More about this report” link. 

The link leads to an article that dives deep into the concept of that specific report. 

Going through these reports and the accompanying resources is like having a private writing coach tutoring you to mastery. This thorough feedback and corrective training is ProWritingAid’s standout feature.

Verdict: ProWritingAid wins on analysis reports — it’s not even a contest.