has anyone used both and recommend one over the other? One review I read showed a bit lower scores for the quality of ProWritingAid editing recommendations. any confirmation of this or insights?
Thoughts and experiences?
I use grammarly and like it. The best thing is it works well as part of Word, so you can look at the grammarly suggestions right in your Word docx. I wait until I’m finished and then run grammarly and look at its suggestions. It’s not always right, but I like having a “second” check.
Anyone else using the free version of Grammarly? Does it drive you as insane as it’s driving me?
Putting the manuscript of Book One through it, I’m discovering it’s two parts dumb to one part clever.
Rule-based as it is, the pure grammar engine does better than I do. But there’s a problem. Grammarly knows grammar but nothing about style.
It keeps nagging me to add transition phrases, in particular, ‘instead’. It’s driving me f***** insane. There is no ‘instead.’ It’s the next action. It also keeps trying to insert ‘then’ and ‘unfortunately’ at the start of sentences.
And inserting ‘that’. Yes, the word every writing coach on the planet tells you to go through and delete.
Dumb.
It can’t really cope with informal language, can it?
It’s suggesting ‘Because’ in place of 'cause. ‘May not be appropriate in this context.’ It clearly knows nothing about context. It’s worse than my drunk English teacher in the 1980’s.
It also doesn’t like repeated words or sentence structures. It knows nothing of rhetoric, of repetition for emphasis.
‘It may be unclear who she refers to.’ There’s only two people in the dialog, one man ‘he’, one woman ‘she’. Duh.
Spelling: when does the verb ‘to get away’ become ‘to getaway’?.
But it is a hip-hop fan. Why else does it want to replace ‘the two pack ponies’ (ponies carrying packs, two of them) with ‘the two-pack ponies?’ What’s next? Suggest ‘the biggest horse’ changed to ‘the Biggie horse?’ 
I haven’t tried Grammarly, but it sounds like it has similar issues as Prowritingaid, which I’ve found to be pretty frustrating. It doesn’t really like fictional writing at all, even though that’s what it’s supposed to be built for.
I’m complaining about Grammarly even though I know it’s not designed for fiction; it’s aimed at dull corporate reports.
I wrote up some more examples on the blog, it was getting unintentionally hilarious:
It also has the vocabulary of a ten-year old.
However, it has been a useful prompt to get me to look at my prose with a sceptical eye. Instead of accepting or rejecting a lot of the dumb suggestions, I’m looking at the text and re-writing better prose.
I’ve ditched Grammarly this week (partly because it’s changed it’s behaviour on the free page and the browser extension is rubbish so I’m refuse to pay for it). I’m trying some other equivalent tools.
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