Introduction
Have you ever had that sinking feeling when you hit send on an email or publish on a blog post, only to realize that you made a careless grammar mistake? Or worse, missed a glaringly obvious typo that completely changed the meaning of your sentence? We've all been there. But thankfully, there are tools out there designed to help us catch these errors before they make it into the world.
Two popular writing tools for catching these mistakes are Grammarly and ProWritingAid. But which one is better? Join us as we compare the features, pricing, and effectiveness of these tools to help you decide which one is right for you.
Features
Both Grammarly and ProWritingAid offer a range of features designed to improve your writing accuracy, including grammar and spelling checks, style suggestions, and readability scores. However, there are a few key differences between the two.
Grammarly offers real-time insights and suggestions for a variety of writing types, including emails, essays, reports, and even social media posts. This tool is also available as a browser extension, making it easy to use across multiple platforms.
ProWritingAid, on the other hand, offers more in-depth analysis of your writing, including a thesaurus, contextual thesaurus, and contextual thesaurus report. This tool is particularly useful for writers who are looking to improve their writing skills beyond the basics of grammar and spelling.
Pricing
When it comes to pricing, both Grammarly and ProWritingAid offer free and premium plans.
Grammarly's free plan includes basic grammar and spelling checks, while its premium plan includes advanced grammar checks, vocabulary suggestions, and genre-specific writing style checks. The premium plan starts at $12/month but can cost up to $29.95/month for additional features like plagiarism checks.
ProWritingAid's free plan includes basic grammar and spelling checks, but its premium plan includes access to style checks, templates, and integrations with other writing tools like Scrivener and Google Docs. The premium plan starts at $20/month and can cost up to $70 for additional features like plagiarism checks.
Effectiveness
To test the effectiveness of these tools, we ran two sets of writing samples through both Grammarly and ProWritingAid. The first sample was a basic paragraph with several grammar and spelling errors, while the second sample was a longer piece of writing with more complex sentence structures.
Grammarly caught most of the errors in both samples, offering easy-to-understand suggestions for how to improve the writing. However, we did notice that Grammarly sometimes made suggestions that didn't quite fit the context of the writing.
ProWritingAid, on the other hand, caught not only the grammar and spelling errors but also pointed out areas where the writing could be improved for clarity and concision. This tool provided insights that were both helpful and easy to implement.
Conclusion
So, which tool is better? Well, it depends on what you're looking for. If you're mainly interested in catching basic grammar and spelling errors, Grammarly is a solid choice. But, if you're looking for a tool that can offer more in-depth analysis and suggestions for improving your writing overall, ProWritingAid might be the better option.
But, remember, there's no substitute for good writing skills. These tools can offer helpful suggestions, but they can't replace a deep understanding of grammar and style. So, keep practicing and keep improving!