Grammarly / ProWritingAid — worth paying for?

@first_draft_dani OP

2mo ago

I keep seeing ads for Grammarly and ProWritingAid and I can't tell if they're genuinely useful for fiction or just glorified spellcheck that flags my voice as wrong. For those who pay for one, what does it actually catch that's worth the money, and where does it get in the way?

11 comments

@the_proofreader2mo ago

ProWritingAid is the better fit for fiction by a wide margin. The reports are the value, not the squiggly lines: the repetition report catches your pet words (mine is 'just'), the sticky-sentence and pacing reports flag where prose drags, and the dialogue tags report shows you've used 'said' 400 times in a row, which is usually fine but good to know. Grammarly leans corporate-email and fights your style more.

@first_draft_daniOP2mo ago

The repetition report is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping existed. Does it choke on a full novel or do you run it chapter by chapter?

@the_proofreader2mo ago

Run it per chapter or per scene. Loading a whole 90k manuscript makes it crawl and the reports get too noisy to act on. Chapter-sized chunks keep the suggestions specific enough that you actually fix things.

@typo_terror2mo ago

The thing both tools cannot do is tell you the scene is boring, the stakes are unclear, or the character would never say that. They check the sentence, never the story. Treat them as a power sander for line-level grit after the structural editing is done, not a substitute for a beta reader or a real editor.

@beta_reader_ben1mo ago

As someone people pay to read their drafts, please run one of these before you send to a human. Not because the human can't catch typos, but because a page riddled with mechanical errors burns my attention on commas instead of your plot. Clean copy gets you better feedback on the stuff that matters.

@rewrite_rachel2mo ago

Both are fine for catching the dumb mechanical stuff (a dropped quote mark, its/it's, a doubled word your eye skips). Where they actively hurt is sentence fragments and rhythm. Fiction lives on fragments. Like this. The tools want to fix it. Learn to dismiss en masse and never enable autocorrect on a manuscript.

@emdash_emma1mo ago

Workflow that keeps them from eating your voice: do all your drafting and revising with the tool completely off. Only on the final line-edit pass do you turn it on, go suggestion by suggestion, and reject anything that's a style call. If you write with it live it nags you into bland, safe sentences mid-flow.

@first_draft_daniOP1mo ago

Settled it for me. I'll grab ProWritingAid on the next sale for the reports, run it chapter by chapter on a final pass with it off the rest of the time, and stop expecting it to fix anything a human editor should. Thanks all.

@indie_ivan1mo ago

On money: ProWritingAid does a one-time lifetime license fairly often on sale, which beats the subscription if you write long-term. Grammarly is subscription only. Both run student discounts if that applies. I'd never pay full monthly price for either, wait for a sale, they're frequent.

@slowburn_sam1mo ago

Privacy note people forget: these tools send your text to their servers to analyze it. For most of us that's a shrug, but if you're under NDA on a ghostwriting gig or paranoid about an unpublished manuscript, check the terms. ProWritingAid has a desktop app that's a bit more contained; Grammarly is browser/cloud-first.

@the_red_pen1mo ago

One free middle ground before anyone pays: the built-in Editor in Word and the free Grammarly browser extension both catch the genuinely mechanical errors at zero cost. The paid tier is really about the analytical reports. If all you want is to stop sending typos, you may not need to spend a thing.