4 Magical Grammar Checker Software – ProWritingAid vs Grammarly vs Ginger vs WhiteSmoke

If you are considering writing as a career, you are required to follow a consistent and lucid writing style, free of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, apart from anything else. It becomes all the more important, if you’re not a native English speaker and you’re planning to write in English for a wider audience. You need to take care of all the niceties and subtleties of the language required for professional blogging and writing professional content but not at the cost of clarity and vivacity of your content.

In this article, we’ll talk about some software, which not only help you with spelling mistakes, but also come in handy in finding grammatical errors and improving your writing style.
So, let’s get started and find out what exactly they have to offer.

Ginger Grammar Check

Ginger Grammar Check is one of the best spelling and grammar checker tools. Additionally, it suggests alternative sentence structures also. Ginger is available for free with a few restrictions but that’s not a big deal because for cutting off the spelling mistakes, it’s sharp enough as it is. Ginger grammar check algorithm is quite impressive. I tested some blatant grammar mistakes and the software very effectively detected them.

Ginger suggests the better/alternative sentence structures, which are really instrumental for a writer to avoid repetition and monotony and come up with vivid and lively content. Browser extensions of Ginger are also available that help refine content in realtime. Ginger’s Desktop app is available for Windows but not for Mac. If you want to use it in Mac, you can use Chrome/Safari extension. But at the moment Ginger doesn’t support Google Docs.

Ginger integration for Microsoft Word is available but unfortunately it is for Windows version not for Mac.

Top Features Of Ginger

Powerful Proofreader – Ginger Proofreader is highly powerful and it helps eliminate all typing mistakes, up to 90%in case of mistakes dealing with ‘s’

Grammar And Punctuation Checker – Ginger checks grammar and punctuation and suggests the corrections.

Sentence Re-phraser – Ginger sentence Re-phraser is another big help. It shows you in how many different ways you can write a sentence without changing its meaning. With the help of this feature, you can make your writing style animated.

My Opinion on Ginger

Ginger is a robust proofreader service for you if you make typos, punctuation and minor grammatical mistakes very frequently. Its sentence re-phraser is really a wonderful tool for writers. But in my opinion, for what it’s worth, Ginger maybe a great help but it most certainly is not what a professional writer actually needs. It can just help you find minor grammatical issues, spelling mistakes, punctuation mistakes but don’t expect it to work like a magic wand.

On a happier note, Ginger offers a full refund within 7 days and you can try it for yourself without worrying about money.

Grammarly

Comprehensive spelling checker and proofreader (available for free users)

You must have encountered Grammarly ad on YouTube as it can be seen running very often. As its name suggests, Grammarly is very good and quick at finding and fixing grammatical mistakes automatically. Their advanced algorithm detects the nature of your content and suggest you the correct usage of words. However, you can get only 10% of these features with its free membership.

Grammarly comes with a very rich thesaurus and displays all the possible synonyms of a word so that you could pick the best word as per the requirement and tone of your content. But the synonym detection feature works well only for individual words and it’s not possible to look for an alternative for a phrase. It’s worth noting here that this issue exists with all four grammar checker tools reviewed in this post.

Additionally, Grammarly’s plagiarism checker lets you find whether your content is copied on other websites.

Here’s My Two Cents

I have tried Grammarly for one month and also tested its free membership. Grammarly premium service is really worth the money. It is not that Grammarly is a panacea and you write anything twaddle, give it a touch of Grammarly and it’s going to look like written by Shakespeare. No, it’s not like that. In other words, you can’t leave everything to Grammarly. But yes, of course, Grammarly will for sure help you improve your writing style, clear your content of basic grammatical mistakes and make it more balanced and polished.

Grammarly is far better and more accomplished at detecting grammatical mistakes automatically than any other online grammar checker software.

You should buy a premium membership of Grammarly if:

If you are a professional writer and need some help to make your written content more attractive and stylish.

You should stick to its free version if:

If you just need a comprehensive proofreader.

You make trivial grammatical mistakes like “s” form mistakes, punctuation errors etc.

What Grammarly Leaves To Be Desired:

The only thing that I feel it lacks is that it doesn’t suggest synonyms or alternatives for more-than-one-word phrases. For example if I want to supplant “kinds of” with an alternative, Grammarly comes up with synonyms for only “kind”. However, Microsoft Word suggests synonyms for even multi-word phrases.

Grammarly Pricing

You can avail Grammarly Premium service for $11+, if you pay for one year. But if you buy it for one month, it is three times more expensive i.e. 29+ per month. I suggest that you  buy it for one year to get an alluring 60% discount.

Grammarly’s Refund Policy

Grammarly doesn’t offer any refund for the duration of time you’ve used it. Besides, their terms-of-services page also doesn’t clearly indicate their refund policy. In my opinion, they may offer a prorated refund – a refund for unused days.

WhiteSmoke

WhiteSmoke is yet another comprehensive proofreader and grammar checker service that is available as Windows and Mac app, Chrome extension and also as Android and iPhone app. Unfortunately, WhiteSmoke offers no free plan and you need to buy its annual subscription to enjoy its services.

WhiteSmoke is much like Ginger and Grammarly. Some people say it is better than Grammarly but personally I find that its algorithm is not as much intelligent as that of Grammarly.

Like Grammarly, it helps you get rid of basic grammatical mistakes and improve writing style. Again, I’d say if you think WhiteSmoke works like magic and can detect even subtle grammatical pitfalls, you are clearly mistaken. It just detects spelling mistakes, punctuation errors, “s” form mistakes and absolute grammatical blunders.

The problem is that WhiteSmoke doesn’t let you try their service for free. But at the same time it is fairly affordable compared to Grammarly.

My Opinion On WhiteSmoke

If you love a proofreader service that comes with dedicated apps for all the platforms like Windows, Mac, Chrome, Android and iOS, WhiteSmoke is for you. Apart from this, I don’t see any particular reason for preferring WhiteSmoke over any other service of this kind.

ProWritingAid

Unlike aforementioned services, ProWritingAid offers much more in its free version and its paid services are also incredibly cheaper. Its plan starts from $50 per year and only for $175, you can get it for lifetime. Its pricing seems to have no match.

ProWritingAid, in a way, is better than Grammarly, WhiteSmoke and Ginger.  I checked all the services one by one and in the end I tried ProWritingAid and what I found was a really amazing and wonderful service in terms of pricing, features, intelligence and ease of use. Ginger, Grammarly and WhiteSmoke, all these services undoubtedly are fantastic and flawless when it comes to proofreading a content. They are also remarkably helpful in sniffing and removing grammatical mistakes. But as for writing style improvement, ProWritingAid is way better and more consummate than them.

ProWritingAid comes with extensive tools to help you make your writing style more direct and clear. Apart from the automatic grammar check, it comes with some really awesome tools to detect many writing flaws, which really make a difference, such as overuse of a single word, redundancy check, intelligent readability check, cliche check, sticky sentence check, diction check, sentence structure check, homonym check, dialogue check etc..

Another major attraction of ProWritingAid is its inbuilt word explorer and it’s really something. If you want to look for the usage of a particular English word, you can do it inside ProWritingAid. This Explorer helps you find example usage, synonyms, antonyms, commonly used words before and after a specific word.

ProWritingAid at a glance

Realtime grammar check

Realtime proofreading

Writing Style Check – It analyzes a single or complete document writing style and suggests certain changes based on standard writing genre you choose.

Overuse Words Check – Overusing a single word may spoil your content and the content loses all its charm and looks ugly and ungainly. ProWritingAid highlights all the words you have used repetitively so that you can review them and replace some of them with better alternatives.

Readability Check – If you’re in the habit of writing long sentences which are hard to parse and decipher, the software recognises such sentences and highlight them with suggestions.

ProWritingAid availability for different operating systems

It has a dedicated web-editor with cross-platform compatibility.  ProWritingAid is available for Windows PC, Mac, Google Chrome, Google Docs add-on, MS Office addon. However, the dedicated apps for iOS and Android are still awaited.

All Things Considered – ProWritingAid vs Grammarly vs Ginger vs WhiteSmoke

On the whole, ProWritingAid in my opinion comes through with flying colors. But it’s also true that each app has its own advantages and strong points. For example, Grammarly is the best as far as proofreading is considered. Similarly, Ginger’s sentence rephrasing feature is first-class. WhiteSmoke is very much like Ginger and Grammarly except for the fact that it doesn’t offer any free trial or free plan, which, I think, isn’t a professional way.