Okay, ProWritingAid has been useful for some things. It helped me fix my inconsistent spelling of “catalog”/”catalogue” and use of the Oxford comma. (I use it, but I don’t care whether other people do.) It spotted the lone accidental en-dash in a 150,000-word document. It correctly identified the fact that I use “feel”/”felt” too often; I was already searching by hand to catch those in my last several projects. (My full list of sins was: could; feel/felt; maybe; -ing at the start of a sentence, which was mostly nonsense; and for some reason, “went.”)
And then there’s this. This is its “glue words” report, or a scan for words it thinks are “unnecessary.” Truly, what is this ridiculous shit?
AI IS INFALLIBLE AND CAN SOLVE ALL YOUR PROBLEMS *FOAM*
Look. Use whatever tools you want to. But from my experience so far, this is a fine spellchecker and grammar checker, a reasonably useful tool to find overused words and repeated phrases (although I spent this morning yelling THAT WAS INTENTIONAL at my laptop like a totally reasonable human), and a bucket full of nonsense for anything at a sentence level.
I’m getting over my guilt at having bought it. But I maintain that its ~AI brilliance~ is wildly oversold. It is nowhere near the replacement for human editing its fans swear it is. You absolutely need to know how to use language in order to sort the wheat from the chaff in the things it flags.
Other amusing incidents from this process so far:
- On its list of “cliches” are such absolutely normal words as
- bake (it completely flipped out at a scene where a character learns how to bake bread; I sent one baffled error report about its bizarre vendetta against baking and then gave up)
- ginger (you know, the spicy ingredient grown underground)
- horse around (as in, “the rider turned the horse around and galloped down the road”; it cannot tell the difference between that sentence and using the stock phrase for “roughhousing”)
- literally any mention of “the market”, which is what makes up the center of the town in this story, so characters walk to/through it all. the. time
- And I already told the program that I am writing fantasy fiction, not a business email or whatever it thinks it’s doing
- Under “inconsistent capitalization,” it mostly listed incidents where a word sometimes appeared at the beginning of a sentence, and sometimes did not. *headdesk* This program knows what a sentence is, supposedly. And yet.
- In the Oxford comma check, it insisted repeatedly that the phrase spoken by the priest MC to open her services, “Welcome, friends and neighbors,” needed another comma: “Welcome, friends, and neighbors.” It does not oh my god what in hell are you talking about.
I’m going to continue to use it to weed out my rampant use of “maybe” (clearly, my characters lack certainty) and “feel”, and stop looking at its sentence-level analysis before my blood pressure shoots through the roof.
Do I recommend this thing? …I got it half off on Black Friday, and my spouse and I can both use it. That plays heavily into my answer of “maybe.” It is saving time vs. relying on my hand-searched list of 60 overused words and common formatting issues (double spaces, etc.), although I might spot-check my old list anyway. And I’m a cranky bastard. I’m sure it’s more useful for other people! I’m yelling at it a lot.
Edit: I used my own list, and then ran the draft through PWA as a last double-check. Maybe it would have saved time to stick with it, but it didn’t even flag most of the words on my list (really, very, thought, etc. — filler-and-filter stuff), which makes me wary.