Getting Started With ProWritingAid

What Is ProWritingAid?

ProWritingAid is a suite of tools for writers that will help you craft, polish, and elevate your writing. ProWritingAid features 25+ writing reports that will allow you to check your writing for sticky sentences, repeated words and phrases, readability, structure issues, and much more.

Creating a ProWritingAid Account

You can sign up to ProWritingAid for free here.

To create an account, you can use your email address or your Google or Facebook accounts.

Our Integrations

ProWritingAid is compatible with many of your favorite writing apps. You can edit your texts directly in our Web Editor, or add ProWritingAid to your computer and internet browser to access all features directly in Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, and more.

Once you create your ProWritingAid account, you can edit using our:

Web Editor: Use ProWritingAid directly on your browser and access your documents from anywhere. Our Web Editor is compatible with the most common text file and markdown types.
Desktop Everywhere (for Windows and Mac): Get editing suggestions and advanced analyses directly in your favorite writing apps installed on your computer.
Chrome extension: Access all of our writing reports on Google Docs, Notion, Atticus, Campfire, and hundreds of other websites.
Firefox extension: Access all of our writing reports directly from your favorite writing websites.
Edge extension: Get writing suggestions and reports across your favorite writing websites.
Desktop Editor: Upload and edit your Scrivener, rich text, Word, and OpenOffice documents locally. We no longer update the Desktop Editor, but you can still download it and use it.

The following video shows you how to get started with our Web Editor:

How to Use ProWritingAid

All of our apps and integrations require an internet connection.

Running Reports

Our 25+ writing reports provide you with a comprehensive analysis of your document and key statistics and insights. You’ll find dozens of video tutorials that will show you how to use the different reports available on our YouTube channel.

You can run our writing reports from all our integrations. In our Web Editor and in our Desktop Editor, you can access the reports from the Reports bar. In all other integrations, you can access the reports by clicking the ProWritingAid icon and then the Reports icon.

When you run a report, you will see several suggestion categories that ProWritingAid has highlighted in your document. Each category has a different color highlight, so you can distinguish them easily in your manuscript.

When you click the drop-down arrow next to each category, you will be able to see each individual suggestion listed to give you an overview of how your writing shapes up. This pane allows you to pick out areas you might want to revise and jump straight to them in your document.

You don’t need to respond to every suggestion. We understand that not all the suggestions will be right for the context or style of your writing.

If you decide you want to focus on one particular category in your editing session, you can hover over the other categories to bring up this menu:

Click on the eye symbol (as highlighted above) to hide the underlines for that category. To reveal those underlines, just click on the eye again.

Suggestion Boxes

When you hover over a highlighted word or sentence in your text, a suggestion box will appear containing potential improvements. This is how that looks in our Style Report:

Click on the blue i icon to see more resources related to the suggestion if you’d like to learn more.

If you like a suggestion, click on it, and ProWritingAid will apply it to the underlined word or phrase.

If you decide you like the word or phrase as it is, you can either leave it underlined, or click Ignore to remove the underline. Please note that this underline will reappear the next time you run the report.

If you feel that a certain type of suggestion is getting in the way, or isn’t relevant to your writing, you can click on Disable Rule. You can re-enable some rules from your settings, but to re-enable other rules, you will need to contact our Support team.

Disabling a rule will only disable it for the exact word pattern you disable it for. For example, if you disable a specific adverb rule, ProWritingAid will still underline other adverbs.

To move through suggestions quickly, use the arrows to the right of the suggestion boxes. These allow you to accept or ignore a suggestion, or to disable a rule, and then move automatically to the next suggestion.

Upgrading to Premium or Premium Pro

You can use ProWritingAid for free. With a free account, you can access all of our writing reports in our Web Editor, but you’ll only be able to edit 500 words at a time.

If you want to edit longer documents, you can upgrade your account to Premium or Premium Pro.

ProWritingAid Premium and Premium Pro will allow you to edit your entire document with no word limit. Be aware that ProWritingAid works best with documents that are 10,000 words or less, and that some features, such as our Critique Report, have a word limit.

You can purchase ProWritingAid Premium and Premium Pro as a Monthly, Annual, or Lifetime subscription. Annual and Lifetime subscriptions are covered by our three-day money-back guarantee. You can read more about this policy here.

Premium and Premium Pro subscriptions offer all the features available to Free accounts, plus unlimited word count, unlimited rephrases, advanced style improvements (including custom style guides), snippets, customizable suggestions, terminology management, author comparisons, citations, collaborations, and Critiques. Premium Pro subscriptions offer more rewriting and style improvements options, with 50 Sparks and 3 Critiques per day. You can find all the features that each subscription offers here.

You can upgrade from Monthly to Annual or Annual to Lifetime or cancel your subscription at any time in your account. If you cancel your subscription, your license will remain active until its expiry date, when your account will be downgraded to a Free account.

All of our integrations are included in your Premium subscription. You can download any of our apps to multiple Windows and Mac computers. However, our licenses are personal: if anyone else wants to use the software, they’ll need to purchase their own license.

Personalizing Your ProWritingAid Account

My Account

In My Account, you can manage your account.

In this page, you can:

Check what license you have, upgrade your plan, and update your payment method.
Change your username, email address, and password.
Enter your company name and address (if applicable).
Manage your email notification preferences.
Purchase Plagiarism Check credits.
Delete your account.

Billing

In your Billing page, you can see your purchase history and update your payment methods.

Dictionary

You can add to your dictionary any words that you use frequently in your work that ProWritingAid doesn’t recognize as a valid word. In your Personal Dictionary, you can add and remove terms.

Settings

In Settings, Premium and Premium Pro users can customize their application settings:

Combo Reports: Here, you can select the reports that will appear in your Combo Report.
Overused Words: Here, you can add words or combinations of words that you’d like ProWritingAid to check for in the Overused words report.
Style Guides: Here, you can set your preferred style guides below. We’ll highlight nonconforming text and suggest improvements.
Dialogue Settings: Here, you can set ProWritingAid to not underline grammar mistakes and other style issues in dialogues if you want your dialogues to be more realistic.
Repeats Settings: Here, you can adjust the settings of the Echoes Report, such as the maximum character distance between highlighted repeats, minimum phrase word length, and minimum phrase occurrences.
Comparison Settings: Here, you can set an author whose work you can compare yours to when you run the Summary Report.
Snippet: Set the character that brings up the list of shortcuts saved as snippets. By default, this is \ .
Company and Product Names: Here, you can add your company name and product names to check for consistency in your documents.

Style Guides

You can set your preferred style guides in the Style Guides settings. We’ll highlight nonconforming text and suggest improvements in your text. Look for the Style Guide label in the pop-up for these highlights.

Term Base

Term Bases allow you to upload your own terminology. You can use this to provide help and definitions for terms, to flag deprecated terms and suggest a replacement, or to prevent terms being flagged by the spellchecker. You can bulk upload your terms in a CSV.

Snippets

Snippets allow you to save characters, words, or phrases that you use regularly, such as uncommon keyboard characters, a link to book a calendar appointment with you, or your email signature or professional biography, and retrieve them using a shortcut.