I use ProWritingAid, editing software that looks for inconsistent terminology, contextual spelling errors, grammar mistakes, and poor writing style. Although I use it, you will find no affiliate link or ad here. That’s because it is my tool, I am not its tool.
What It Does
ProWritingAid, which I am going to truncate to PWA going forward, is a combination of existing tools, like grammar and spell checkers, and a lot of extra analytical tools. I generally use Word to type my novels. It contains a fundamental spell checker, grammar checker, and a few extras like a thesaurus.
Checking With Word
Let’s look at Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, which has sold tens of million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 50 languages. First, I copied the first paragraph of the novel into Word.
Word objects to the spelling of just one word, Mbaino, in the first paragraph. It accepts Amalinze, Umuofia and Okonkwo. Word sees no other concerns with this paragraph.
Checking with ProWritingAid
I fired up PWA and without ado, here’s what it suggested:
It highlighted “Okonkwo was well known” and suggests it is a problem. PWA does not recognize the name Okonkwo as a name. PWA suggests “Passive verbs hide the subject of your sentence. Try to rewrite this sentence using an active verb with the most suitable subject.”
It then suggests either “I well knew okonkwo” or “They well knew okonkwo” as better alternatives. Oops! Those are terrible phrases, even if ‘Okonkwo’ was not a person.
Poe Knows
I substituted the word pizza for the word Okonkwo, and it returned the same recommendation: “I well knew pizza” or “They well knew pizza”. What? They well knew pizza? Who says that? I can’t argue with passive versus active verbs, but I sure know when something doesn’t sound quite right.
It’s not that “I well knew…” is one hundred percent wrong, it isn’t. It’s The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe:
“…I had told them that I should not return until the morning, and had given them explicit orders not to stir from the house. These orders were sufficient, I well knew, to insure their immediate disappearance, one and all, as soon as my back was turned…”
For anyone who watched Altered Carbon Season 2, you know how strange it is to the modern ear to hear Poe speak. He’s not wrong, but it sure doesn’t seem right.
ProWritingAid Isn’t Perfect
I well knew this would be an excellent example to show PWA is not one hundred percent. It knows it’s not one hundred percent, and is simply offering suggestions. If I were the author, I’d ignore the recommendation. Let’s move on to the next suggestion, the word “As” which begins the next sentence.
It has flagged “As” and suggested: Always use a comma after a long introductory prepositional phrase. Well, that would be wrong: “As, a young man of eighteen he had brought honor to his village…” That is not correct, not even one percent. I would ignore that suggestions, too.
As a Young Man of Eighteen
The next word PWA suggests has a problem is “eighteen”: Missing comma after prepositional phrase. A prepositional phrase is “a modifying phrase consisting of a preposition and its object.”
At the beginning of the sentence, we have “As a young man”, which is the introductory phrase. ProWritingAid (and Grammarly, but not Word) suggest adding a comma after the word “eighteen”: “As a young man of eighteen, he had brought honor to his village.”
Complex Sentence
Let’s look at the complex sentence: “It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.”
Here are PWA’s suggestions:
- Okonkwo fought fiercely with a man who was known for his strength.
- Okonkwo’s fight with this man was described by the old men as one of the fiercest battles since the town’s founder battled a wild spirit for a week.
- The man that Okonkwo fought was considered to be his toughest opponent yet, and the old men likened the fight to a legendary battle with a wild spirit.
The first suggestion lacks personality. The second suggestion returns a passive verbs warning and suggests yet another change (The old me described Okonkwo’s fight with this man…).
The third change, if made, would return two errors, one of which is a suggestions to change to “…was considered being his toughest opponent yet..”
You Need to Know What’s Right and Wrong
Clearly, you need a strong enough sense of English to know which of PWA’s suggestions you should take, and which you should refuse.
But there is more to PWA. It has a summary report. In this case, the first chapter of Things Fall Apart has a grammar score of 38%, spelling of 67% and style of 74%. If offers information on Dialogue Distribution, a Pacing Check and Sticky Sentence Report. This is the report for that one paragraph from Things Fall Apart.
A Comparison
Looking at the Summary Report, you can see just a few of the many things PWA is looking at. For Achebe, it suggests a lot of areas that may need work.
For me, it suggests I used the word ‘He’ to begin too many close sentences (I do not name the canoeist until later).
This is absolutely not to suggest that my writing is better than Achebe’s, only that I followed many of ProWritingAid’s recommendations and now I score appropriately for their algorithm.
It Improved My Writing
I am not Achebe, I do not write at all like him. I write like me. With PWA, I was able to catch things I would never have seen. This includes repeated words, an inclination to reuse certain phrases, and how often I used the words feel/feels/felt/feeling just in that one paragraph.
It’s a tough slog to go through the reports, recommendations and suggestions from ProWritingAid. On more than one occasion I cursed at it and called it names. But it absolutely improved my writing, and I recommend it.
And finally, here is ProWritingAid’s summary report of where this blog post is weak:
Later, friend…
P.S. photograph by Karolina Grabowska, screenshots by me.
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