Most authors have heard of ProWritingAid, but many haven’t explored it and may not know how best to use it. In this blog post, I’ll go over whether ProWritingAid is helpful for short stories and novels, as well as whether your writing is safe when you use it.
ProWritingAid describes itself as “the essential toolkit for every storyteller” and prides itself on empowering writers. There are over 3 million users of ProWritingAid across the world.
I want to focus on how ProWritingAid can be used to make your writing better and why I’m comfortable using the software on my own writing.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links with ProWritingAid. This means that I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you if you sign up for ProWritingAid for free or purchase a subscription for ProWritingAid through one of my links. For transparency, I’ve included an extended disclaimer at the bottom of this page.
What is ProWritingAid?
ProWritingAid is an online writing assistant that writers can use for self-editing stories, novels, blog posts, and more. The software is one of the most secure writing assistants out there, and they’re clear that they will never use your writing to train their AI.
This blog post goes through my experience with ProWritingAid, including:
- What the ProWritingAid AI is trained on
- Whether it’s safe to use for your writing
- Whether ProWritingAid can replace a human editor
- The differences between free and paid ProWritingAid
- The community events run by the company
How does ProWritingAid work?
ProWritingAid is available as a web editor and as integrations. There are several ProWritingAid integrations to choose from, whether you prefer applications or browser extensions.
The web editor is easy to use and its free version can work on up to 500 words at a time (flash fiction writers, rejoice!). You can skip to my guide on using the web editor by clicking the button below:
Desktop Everywhere is available as a ProWritingAid application for Windows and Mac. These integrations work on desktop applications like Word, Scrivener, Vellum, and more.
There are also browser extensions for Google Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.
How the ProWritingAid AI works and what it’s trained on
AI is one of my biggest concerns with any kind of writing assistant, so it’s something I’ve looked into a lot when judging my own use of ProWritingAid. They’re clear about their use of Artificial Intelligence, with multiple assurances that text used in their web editor is not trained on.
Instead, they say that ProWritingAid’s AI is trained on texts ‘hand corrected by professional copyeditors to train our algorithms’. While this doesn’t confirm whether the texts are in the public domain or created specifically for their company, it’s a bigger reassurance than their competitors offer.
There are also three levels to their AI: there’s the AI that analyses your writing, the optional generative AI tools like Rephrase and Sparks, and the AI feedback tools like Chapter Critique, Manuscript Analysis, and Virtual Beta Reader.
For the writers against the use of generative AI like myself, anything generative is completely optional. I don’t use any of the Feedback/Critique options, and I don’t use Rephrase or Sparks either. Even so, I find the ProWritingAid editor very useful for short pieces of work.
Is ProWritingAid safe to use for writers?
ProWritingAid assures their users that your writing is completely secure when you use their web editor. They are adamant that no customer data is ever used to train their models or other models, and that they have no rights to your writing.
This is so much better than other AI-based writing software, including Microsoft Word (if you haven’t turned off their AI training setting).
ProWritingAid AI features
As I mentioned, ProWritingAid’s AI features can be summed up as:
- AI editor (non-generative)
- Generative tools: Rephrase and Sparks
- AI feedback tools: Chapter Critique, Manuscript Analysis, and Virtual Beta Reader
Every aspect of ProWritingAid is optional, and you’re not required to use any tool you’re uncomfortable with. You can also turn off Rephrase and Sparks in the dropdown menu.
As I personally don’t use any of the generative or feedback tools, I can’t give you an explanation of how they work from personal experience, but this is how they’re described by the company:
- Rephrase: “gives you instant suggestions to reword your sentences.”
- Sparks: “a set of extended AI features that … help with editing and enhancing longer text … [and] provide instant ideas for brainstorming and all kinds of creative experimenting”.
- Chapter Critique: “offers on-demand developmental critique of your chapter.”
- Manuscript Analysis: “offers on-demand actionable feedback to writers of all experience levels.”
- Virtual Beta Reader: “offers a reader’s opinion of your full story to writers of all experience levels.”
Will ProWritingAid replace a human editor?
As a proofreader, I’m often asked if I think human editors will be replaced by AI or writing assistants. Having used ProWritingAid and other writing assistants in the past, I can say unequivocally no.
ProWritingAid’s strengths are in how the web editor helps an author to review their own writing, not in how it edits. No writing assistant software is perfect, and it’s all about how the human writer self-edits their writing.
Software like ProWritingAid can help tidy text up to save writers money when hiring a human editor and/or proofreader. It’s difficult for any writer to review their own writing, so when something like ProWritingAid highlights potential problems it helps the writer assess what is an intentional choice and what is a mistake.
Your own reliance on ProWritingAid depends on whether you’re part of a critique group, whether you feel comfortable sharing a particular piece with other writers, and whether you can afford human editors.
In my opinion, writers can use ProWritingAid to:
- assess stylistic problems in a piece, especially repetitions, difficult phrases, and issues with readability
- get quick suggestions for errors in grammar, punctuation, and spelling
- tidy up writing before sending it to an editor or proofreader
- self-edit before a deadline when nobody else can offer a critique or give you feedback
After using ProWritingAid to support self-editing, remember that a human editor can still help you by bringing in a reader’s perspective, as well as genre-specific knowledge.
Is ProWritingAid good for editing short stories?
All of the above makes ProWritingAid a great option for editing short stories and flash fiction on a self-editing scale. If you’re a prolific writer or a writer trying to get yourself out there by submitting to competitions, magazines, and anthologies, it might be more economical to pay for ProWritingAid than hiring a human editor.
That isn’t to say that human editors aren’t worth their fee (I’m a proofreader, after all). You will get so much more out of paying someone for a developmental edit or copy-edit of your writing, but that’s only if you can afford it.
There are also limitations to bear in mind: ProWritingAid won’t detect nuances like character dialogue, accents, new or fabricated slang, and worldbuilding. These limitations are the same with any writing software, though you might be able to use the custom Style Guides to help as a Premium user.
How the ProWritingAid web editor works
I chose a piece of my own flash fiction to go through the ProWritingAid web editor, which you’ll see in the screenshots below. This demonstration is correct as of September 2025.
When you begin using the ProWritingAid web editor, you’re able to write directly on the website (though be sure to save a backup elsewhere) or paste text into the editor. Immediately, you’ll begin to see a panel of data and improvement suggestions.
The right-hand panel has two tabs, one for Goals and the other for Improvements. For example, the Goals tab on the right-hand panel includes:
- Grammar/Spelling
- Style Score
- Style Guide Compliance
- Sentence Length
- Readability Grade
- Sentence Variety
- Glue Index
- Passive Voice
- Business Jargon
- Complex Paragraphs
- Conjunction Starts
- Slow Pacing
- Very Long Sentences
- Emotion Tells
- -ing Starts
- Dialogue Tags
- Unusual Dialogue Tags
- Dialogue Tags with Adverbs
- Weak Adverbs
Your panel might be in a different order. It can feel overwhelming at first, but at the top you can select from the dropdown menu what your actual goal is, picking from the following categories and then more specialised options:
- General
- Academic
- Business
- Technical
- Creative
- Casual
- Web
- Script
For my purposes, I selected Fiction > General Fiction, which changed some of the individual options available to me.
On the same panel, you can select Improvements at the top to see each suggested improvement. As a member of the free version, you’ll see some of these are marked ‘Premium’, and can only be unlocked by paying for full access to ProWritingAid.
Going through each improvement is easy, as each improvement is highlighted and it explains what needs to be improved and why. You can accept the suggestion, disable the rule, or dismiss the individual suggestion.
At the top of the web editor are even more options. Here’s a quick overview of each:
- Purchase (brings you to a different tab on Pricing)
- Realtime toggle (turns off/on the right-hand panel)
- Critique (dropdown menu for getting different types of feedback, including Chapter Critique, Manuscript Analysis, and Virtual Beta Reader)
- Summary (a more in-depth overview of your writing, expanding on the Goals and Improvements tabs)
- Style (opens left-hand panel and checks your writing style and lists stylistic choices, such as clauses, passive verbs, adverbs outside of dialogue, passive voice, etc.)
- Grammar (opens left-hand panel and gives you a Spelling Score and lists grammar issues)
- Rephrase (opens left-hand panel and gives you a list of possible rephrase suggestions)
- Thesaurus (opens left-hand panel and suggests synonyms, listed by nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives)
- Overused (opens left-hand panel and lists words and phrases you have used multiple times)
- Combo (opens left-hand panel and allows you to list multiple reports at the same time, which you can customise in your Settings)
- All Repeats (opens left-hand panel and lists frequent phrases based on how many words are in each phrase)
- Echoes (opens left-hand panel and lists close repeats of the same words and phrases)
- Structure (opens left-hand panel and checks the different sentence structures you use)
- Length (opens left-hand panel and checks the sentence lengths you use)
- Transition (opens left-hand panel and lists the transitions you use)
- Readability (opens left-hand panel and assesses the readability of your writing)
- Sticky (opens left-hand panel and checks how many sentences are ‘sticky’ because of how many ‘glue words’ are used)
- Cliches (opens left-hand panel and checks how many cliches and redundancies you use)
- Diction (opens left-hand panel and lists vague and abstract words)
- Pronoun (opens left-hand panel and lists how many pronouns you use)
- Alliteration (opens left-hand panel and lists how many alliterative phrases you use)
- More Reports (dropdown menu that lists more options: Homonym, Consistency, Acronym, Dialogue, Pacing, Sensory, House, and Plagiarism)
All of these reports can give you a more objective view of your writing style. There’s a lot to look at, so it’s worth focusing on one part at a time. I personally find the Realtime view of Goals and Improvements enough for my own short stories, but if there’s something I’m concerned about or a critique partner has mentioned, I’ll explore the individual reports to focus my editing on those areas.
For example, my flash fiction piece ‘Punctuality’ has a high glue index of 45.8%, above the recommended 40% for General Fiction. There are 3 sticky sentences I can look at for improvements, as shown below.
Just because the writing assistant suggests an improvement doesn’t mean you need to accept it. Ultimately, ProWritingAid is a writing assistant to help you edit, not to rewrite your work for you. In this case, I assessed each sticky sentence and tried rewriting each until I had something I was happier with: for example, changing “When I come back” to “When I return”. The other sticky sentences could be rewritten, but for this piece I wanted to keep them as intentional elements of the story.
The Menu in the top-left corner of the web editor offers extra options, including:
- A toggle for using Curly Quotes
- Two options to convert all curly quotes to straight quotes or all straight quotes to curly quotes
- The Word Explorer for searching for words’ definitions, synonyms, examples, rhymes, collocations, quotes, and more
- A toggle for showing/hiding the Rephrase toolbar
- A toggle for showing/hiding the Sparks toolbar
- A link to a new tab for your profile
- A toggle for Dark mode, called Vampire Mode
- An option for editing your Style Guides
- An option for editing your Dictionary
- An option for editing your Snippets (essentially a bank of common phrases you don’t want to type out in full every time, like your professional bio or uncommon keyboard characters you use)
Finally, there’s an option for Settings at the top of the web editor. This tab provides quick access to the language and document type, with another button for user application settings. User application settings are only open to Premium members of ProWritingAid.
Any of these options could be changed or added to at any time. The above was last updated in September 2025.
Is ProWritingAid free?
ProWritingAid has a robust free version of the web editor that’s useful for every writer, even if it’s just to check a paragraph or two at a time. The free version works on up to 500 words at a time, so if you have too many words it will only work on the first 500 words.
The free version of ProWritingAid also has limited free credits for reports, rephrases, and more of their more advanced features.
A full rundown of Free vs Premium vs Premium Pro can be found on the ProWritingAid Pricing page.
Is it worth paying for ProWritingAid?
Because the free version is so limited when it comes to word count, it isn’t great for novel writers, while short story writers and flash fiction writers can make the most of it.
The biggest differences between Free and Premium subscriptions are:
- Free users are limited to 500 words, while Premium users have unlimited words
- Premium users can use all the analysis reports with no restrictions
- Premium users can create a custom style guide
- Premium users have unlimited document storage, while Free users have an undefined limit on document storage
There are also differences between Premium and Premium Pro subscriptions, such as:
- Premium Pro users have access to daily cowriting sprints, group critique sessions, writing networking events, and guided writing challenges
- Premium Pro users have access to live workshops with authors and editors, as well as the Workshop Library of past webinars and events
Personally, I think the Free version is great for anyone getting started as an author; the Premium version is great for pushing through edits for your novel; and the Premium Pro version is great for authors seeking community and more intensive support with editing.
Community events and more
ProWritingAid also has a community feature, hosted in their own forum-like software known as the ProWritingAid Premium Pro Community, as well as community events.
In the past, I’ve joined themed Writers’ Weeks hosted by ProWritingAid, with each week focused on a different genre. Recordings of these events can be found in the Community’s Workshop Library.
The Premium Pro Community is a relatively new addition; I got involved with the advent of the 5k In 5 Days challenge in November 2024 and it’s changed a lot in a year. The Community includes different writing sprints and challenges to help you with accountability and momentum with your writing.
One of the newest additions is their new writing challenge, Novel November. As a successor to NaNoWriMo, Novel November (or NovNov) is all about writing 50,000 words in 30 days. The challenge includes:
- The ability to track your word count in any software you use to write (Word, Scrivener, Google Docs, etc.)
- Advice from best-selling authors in live sessions
- Daily writing sprints
- Online networking events
- Rewards and badges for meeting milestones
NovNov kicks off in October with a month dedicated to preparing and plotting, then November is all about writing, and finally December’s focus is on editing what you’ve written.
Disclaimer (extended)
I’ve used ProWritingAid intermittently in the past, mostly for their community events and webinars. I signed up for an account in January 2021; went to my first Fantasy Writer’s [sic] Week in February 2021; attended Romance Writer’s [sic] Week in October 2021, Fantasy Writers’ Week in February 2022, Fantasy Writers’ Week in February 2023, Romance Writers’ Week in February 2024, and Fantasy Writers’ Week in April 2024; took parts in 5k In 5 Days in November 2024; and went to numerous one-off webinars hosted by ProWritingAid in that time.
I wouldn’t have joined an affiliate scheme of any software without feeling confident that it doesn’t rely solely on generative AI or Large Language Models. Because ProWritingAid champions human creativity and is transparent about their use of Artificial Intelligence, I believe that they (as a business and as software) align with my values.
Here’s some evidence to show why I support ProWritingAid:
- ProWritingAid Terms of Service (version 9 September 2025):
- 4.1: “… we never use or access your content unless you specifically permit us to or where it’s required in order to comply with the law. For grammar checking, once checking has been completed, all submitted texts and their improvements will be deleted. When using ProWritingAid, your texts will not be used to improve the quality of our services.”
- 4.1 (continued): “We use texts hand corrected by professional copyeditors to train our algorithms to ensure that our data is of the highest quality.” This means they have permission to train on the work done by those copyeditors, and either have permission to use the text or are using text in the public domain.
- 4.3: “You retain ownership of all content you post, upload to, or otherwise share on the site.”
- ProWritingAid Privacy Policy (version 20 February 2024):
- “We do not retain any rights to any of the documents or other content uploaded into our system.”
- ProWritingAid About Us page (as of 12 September 2025):
- “ProWritingAid has grown by taking a different path. We haven’t taken money from VCs. We remain proudly and happily independent.”
- “As a company run by writers, we know how important your writing is. We only use your text to help you improve your writing. Nothing else. We never share your text or use it for other purposes.
Furthermore, as an independent software company, we don’t have corporate shareholders who might pressure us to compromise our ethics for the sake of profit.”
Personally, I’ll be using ProWritingAid for quick self-editing help on short stories and flash fiction, as I’ve demonstrated above with screenshots. I’m opting out of anything that feels too generative or energy-draining, but that’s my personal usage. You can use what feels right for you.
I hope this guide was helpful. As mentioned, I am an affiliate of ProWritingAid, so if you click any links on this page leading to their website, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you if you sign up for ProWritingAid for free or purchase a subscription for ProWritingAid.