Quick Guide to Proofreading: Top 4 Proofreading Tools

by Rob Davis Sr. Editor

There are no two views about the fact that content writing is essential for businesses to survive in today’s highly competitive digital world. However, with Google continuously revising its algorithm and giving more importance to quality than quantity, you cannot just publish anything on your website. In fact, publishing poor-quality or thin content can do you more harm than good.

When it comes to creating quality content, most of the writers invest all their time and effort into research and getting their thoughts and ideas down on paper and give little attention to proofreading and editing. This is one of the biggest mistakes content writers make. Proofreading and editing are as important as the writing itself, and your basic spell checker isn’t fit for the task.

Proofreading and editing is a comprehensive task. Most writers lack the skills required to do the job well. This is why even the best writers take help from eBook proofreading services to make sure their work is completely error-free, in every sense of the word, before publishing it. However, you don’t necessarily need to hire a professional proofreader for every piece of content you create. Still, you do need a good proofreading tool!

If you’re responsible for content creation, you need to have a good, reliable proofreading tool in your arsenal–there’s no way around it.

To save you from the trouble of trying and testing various proofreading tools to find a good, reliable one, here we are listing some of the best proofreading tools for content creators and editors:

1. Slick Write

Slick Write is a free online proofreading tool that doesn’t just check your work for spelling and grammatical errors but helps improve your writing’s quality by providing detailed analysis or critique, as they call it.

The proofreading tool evaluates your writing for style, structure, grammar, readability, and flow and highlights the problematic words and areas. As you place the cursor on the highlighted words, it tells you the reason why they have been highlighted, let’s say passive voice or grammar mistake. And as you click on these highlighted words, you also get a brief explanation of the problem.

Slick Write also evaluates each sentence of your content for structural flow, sentence length flow, and word length flow and presents the results in the form of a graph. For structural flow, it shows what percentage of each sentence is fragmented, simple, complex, and compound-complex. For sentence length and word length flow, it provides you a score for each sentence. The proofreading tool also gives you the option to get improvement suggestions to improve the flow of your writing.

Slick Write also provides a statistical breakdown of your content. This section provides details on factors like passive voice index, vocabulary variety, function words, automated readability index, and the use of uncommon words.

All in all, Slick Writing is a great proofreading and editing tool and offers a good insight into your writing. Do give it a try; it’s free!

2. ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid is one of the most popular proofreading and editing tools among serious writers and rightly so! The platform offers many highly useful set of advanced features to help improve the quality and flow of your writing. It checks your work for 20 different elements of writing, including style, length, alliteration, repetitiveness, overused words and phrases, clichés, sentence length variation, diction, transition, and plagiarism, along with highlighting your basic grammar and spelling mistakes. You also get an overall readability report for your entire document.

There are different pricing plans available for users with varying needs. There’s also a free version of ProWritingAid (with limited features), so you can try it out before buying a subscription plan.

3. Grammarly

Grammarly is one of the most widely used proofreading tools that many professional writers use and trust. From students and teachers to bloggers, researchers, and eBook writers, all the different groups of writers and professionals rely on Grammarly to proofread their works. It’s the go-to grammar and spelling checker for millions of people all over the world. And it’s not difficult to understand why.

Grammarly offers a set of useful features; it is easy-to-use, quick, reliable, and has a free tier. You don’t even need to download any software or app. What else does one want?

Grammarly’s most appreciated features are that it highlights grammatical errors, wrong word usage, and structural issues. It also provides options on how they can be eliminated or improved. Writers can make the changes with just one click; one simple click on the suggestion will apply the suggested change to your document. Grammarly browser and MS Word extension further streamline the proofreading process and makes it even easier. It enables you to check your work while you’re writing.

Grammarly also checks your writing for punctuation – something that many of us tend to ignore or take lightly, but which has the power to change the meaning of sentences completely.

The proofreading tool also allows you to check the tone of your writing before publishing or sending it to someone to make sure it’s appropriate for your content.

4. Ginger

Ginger is another reliable proofreading tool that has helped writers improve the quality of their work for a long time. While its features are pretty much similar to that of Grammarly, Ginger is more comprehensive and caters to a much wider range of writing issues than Grammarly. Ginger has long been known as a proofreading tool that can point out mistakes or problem areas in a piece of content that most other standard proofreading tools fail to catch.

The only downside of Ginger is that its web browser extension doesn’t highlight errors in the document. Instead, you need to write or copy your work on a small Ginger extension window (that opens up on a screen’s side), check and rectify the mistakes and then copy it back to the website you were originally writing on. While this isn’t a big issue, it adds an unnecessary step to the proofreading process and acts as a bummer for many writers.

Never Publish Your Work Without Proofreading!

Proofreading your work thoroughly before publishing is very important for having a draft that is readable and exudes competence. Whether you’re writing a professional email, a blog post, an article, or an eBook, use these proofreading tools or hire an eBook proofreading service to make sure it’s good enough to be published or sent to your audience. There’s no excuse for publishing content ridden with errors, so save your reputation and do not skip this step.