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.