You know that cute thing where cats and toddlers, and always dogs, bounce in going “I Halp! I Halp!”

Well, this writing tool is like that. I’d decided I was going to look into some writing tools over the Black Friday sales period (which seems to be a week and counting, these days) and pick up any that looked interesting. One I got, Scrivener, I haven’t used yet. Next time I start a story from scratch. And after I got it, I opened it late in the evening, saw that reading the Basics tutorial section was going to take an hour, and closed it again. I’ve been recommended Scrivener for years, so when it was on a reasonable sale, I decided I’d give it a whirl.

On the other hand, ProWritingAid which was the other tool I picked up, I opted to start out with a one-year subscription. I am very much not a fan of the subscription model, but PWA also offers a lifetime licence at a fairly high price (even on sale) so I decided to treat the one year like an extended trial period, following which if I like it an am using it consistently, I will pick up the lifetime. I also made sure I put a reminder on my calendar so I don’t miss an auto-renewal next year.

I wanted to try ProWritingAid to see if it would help me catch some ongoing editing issues I have. One of those is misuse and abuse of commas. For this, it seems to be good, although I’ve seen it correct a sentence, then want to change it back on another pass through. Fortunately, as you can see, this isn’t changing stuff automatically. I have a choice with every suggested change. This is good, it makes me look at the sentence and sometimes even paragraph with more critical eyes. I can always dismiss the suggestion.

I can also disable the rules. I did this as soon as it started suggesting I change things to be gender neutral. There’s a specific toggle to switch that off in your personal style guide. Which is terribly handy!

The style guide enables you to do everything from confirming that yes, the Oxford Comma is the only kind of comma to how you want to handle formal language (if you were writing, say, an academic paper) or spaces around ellipses. Then, when you are running PWA after writing, it will flag the specific issues relating to your personal guide for potential changes. This, I like.

I will say that you should always either enter the document into PWA manually after you’ve completed it, or if you’re writing in a browser where it is active (like it is for my Substack) toggle it to ‘focus’ while you are composing so it won’t throw pop-ups and distract you into editing while you should be writing.

I’ve opened out the little sidebar menu here, generally in my browser it’s only showing the little book logo icon at the top. The NovNov is for people doing the novel november challenge with them. Not something I’m interested in, and in fact, something I should mention is that there are two levels of PWA, Premium, and Premium Pro. The upper and more expensive level gives you things like participation in writing groups and AI critique of your work. I neither need nor want those things, so I really didn’t want to pay more for them. I don’t think I’d recommend you use that, either. Writing groups and personal feedback are so critical and young writers can be vulnerable, far better for this to come from people you know and trust.

Speaking of trusting. The highlighted sentence above is wrong and likely needs rephrased entirely. The suggested sentence is hilariously wrong and should never appear in print. Don’t trust this program blindly. It will lead you down the garden path and into the weeds if you let it. In addition to occasionally being so wrong it’s funny, it will try to dumb down your word usage and vocabulary.

“Always a glee” as a greeting would be something. Silly. I’m about to entirely switch off the Style Guide, which you’ll see is an option on their dropdown there, because it seems to inevitably go for the most banal word or in this case, something that makes no sense in context. You’re the writer, you have the voice, don’t let the program scrub all of you off your story. Unless you’re writing that academic paper, in which case, hand it some powdered cleanser and let it have at.

You can also run reports on the text you’ve fed into it. I’ve found this useful for overuse of a word in a document. It will also catch phrases you may have overused. Again, you’ll have to check every instance and decide for yourself if you’re going to take the advice: just like you would with a human editor.

Which brings me to why I picked up this program and intend to use it. I’m not replacing my editing team. I’m simply trying to make their lives easier by sending them a fairly clean document to begin work on. PWA should be helpful there, catching sentences that need some comma work, and I do like that it tells me why the comma is wrong/missing, because it is refreshing me on where I can learn to put them in (or leave them out, which seems to be my worst error). The frequent phrases and words is a useful report, as some of my current work is being done years after I started a story, and most of us pick up verbal tics, which change over time.

Because you can toggle off things like the inclusive language nonsense, and the ‘dumb down your vocab!’ bits, as I figure the program out and guide it to what I want and no more than that, I think it will be helpful. I’m still on the fence about the passive voice thing. I have a habit of defaulting to passive if I am tired or sick. However, some of the sentences it flags as passive are simply past tenses. Again, this is going to come down to what you feel is best. I like that it flags them and makes me think about the way I’ve written that particular sentence. I tend to find revision heavy going because my brain is more interested in the story than in the underlying grammatical structures. This makes it easier for me to focus on the grammar.

To recap: write the story, then edit. I say again: DO NOT EDIT BEFORE YOU FINISH THE STORY. And then, if you feel like a tool would be useful, see if this one might help you whip the story into shape. It certainly will not replace editors and beta readers, but I suspect it will help my editors and make their lives easier when they get a cleaner manuscript from me.