Proofreading software can make your writing easier and more efficient in addition to reducing the errors in your essay. Although useful, you should still know the basics of grammar, spelling, and punctuation to make sure you use them effectively.
Not all proofreading software is created equal. There are two major factors that you should take into account when using or purchasing software. First, how well a software works depends on what it’s trained on.
This means the model data that the software is fed to make automatic corrections or to point them out. Second, proofreading tools are only as good as the person using them.
If you don’t have the knowledge, training, or experience as an academic writer, you may fail to achieve the success you expect with this software.
There are several important proofreading software that can be used both in academic writing and professional writing. However, I will look at only three here:
These are software that I have personal experience with. Just for a quick summary—1. Grammarly is ideal for blogs and SEO editing; 2. PerfectIt is designed for academic writing; and 3. Scribendi Ai is used best as a tool for professional academic editors.
Read on to learn more about the benefits of each of these proofreading software tools and how you can use them in your academic writing.
1. Grammarly
Grammarly is one of the most popular proofreading software. It is also widely used among college students. However, Grammarly is not ideal for all types of academic writing.
Grammarly is best used for blogs, emails, and social media posts. In addition, it may also be used for “lighter” forms of academic writing. What do I mean by that?
Well, you can use it for relatively short academic essays that do not use highly technical language. I mean essays that are less than 2000 words. For more academic and technical pursuits, such as journal papers meant for publication in peer-reviewed journals, you should not use it.
Grammarly is popular for good reason. It can be applied as a plug-in that can be integrated into anything on your computer or smartphone. This includes:
Your Word document
Google Chrome browser
Google Documents
Your G-Mail software
In fact, you can use both the free and paid versions of Grammarly in just about any window on your electronic device in which you can type.
Grammarly is ideal for catching the most obvious errors that you miss through rushing or being careless. However, it is not refined for highly technical academic writing. However, it’s excellent for professional writing. This includes:
Professional emails
Blogs
Social media posts
Short academic essays with non-technical language
The free version of Grammarly may be sufficient for basic proofreading and spellchecking. However, with the premium and business versions, you can:
Adjust your writing tone
Generate text with AI
Incorporate a style guide
The table below shows the different tiers, their pricing, and the features each comes with. Although the free tier of Grammarly provides comprehensive punctuation and grammar corrections, you might want to examine the premium and business versions.
You should do so especially because they appear to be relatively cheap at $12 and $15 for the Premium and Business tiers, respectively.
2. PerfectIt
PerfectIt is designed as a stylistic editing guide. What does this mean? The tool’s main focus is enforcing consistency throughout your document. It is ideal for lengthy and very technical academic documents, unlike Grammarly.
PerfectIt is designed for academic writers and editors who work with highly technical academic documents. It can help them save time and achieve higher levels of efficiency. Casual writers wouldn’t find PerfectIt to be too useful.
This is true especially because perfectIt doesn’t check for grammar and spelling. It will check for consistency in spelling, but it is not a general spell checker. Apart from professional editors, the following professionals would find PerfcetIt useful:
Students writing their thesis
NGOs writing lengthy reports
Writers writing Lengthy white papers
The main advantage of PerfectIT lies in the speed with which it makes consistent changes according to a specific style throughout your document. Where manual corrections could take several hours, PerfectIt does it merely in a matter of minutes.
How does PerfectIt work?
PerfectIt relies on ready-made style guides that can be automatically applied or enforced throughout your document. Unlike Grammarly, PerfectIT can only be used in Word.
Here is a list of styles applied by PerfectIt:
American Legal Style
United Nations Style
WHO Style
Australian Government Style
UK Spelling
Canadian Spelling
PerfectIt has even added a premium package that includes the CMoS style guide. Each of these styles will be applied by the software to make sure everything in your Word document remains consistent in terms of spelling, formatting, heading and subheading capitalization, and so on.
In addition to this, PerfectIt allows you to customize its available styles. For example, if you choose the UK style for your document, you can customize settings to make sure you keep “ize” spellings that are more typical of the US than they are of the UK.
3. Scribendi AI
Scribendi AI is a proofreading tool that was developed by the editing company Scribendi. It has the spell and grammar check features of Grammarly, as well as the consistency-enforcement features of PerfectIt.
ScribediA is best used as a tool in the hands of professional editors and proofreaders. Nonetheless, students and academics who have a fair grasp of academic writing may find it useful.
Nonetheless, I recommend this to be used primarily as a tool for professional editors working on academic documents.
How was ScribendiAi developed?
The Scribendi Ai software is superior to many alternatives because of its training data. In the beginning of the article, I mentioned that a software tool is only as good as the person wielding it as well as the data upon which it was trained.
In the case of Scribendi, they developed and trained a tool based on the work of highly qualified professional editors editing millions of words. Therefore, you can describe it as a hive brain of efficient and highly trained editors.
According to Scribendi, their proofreading tool is:
. . . based on a dataset of more than 1 billion words and 30 million sentences annotated by professional editors to mirror the workings of the human brain, offering more accurate suggestions than other grammar tools.
The tool includes several features to make editing efficient and speedy for editors. It checks both spelling and grammar and can make corrections on the sentence or phrase level.
Conclusion on best proofreading software
There are a wide range of proofreading software tools. I chose three of them—Grammarly, PerfectIt, and Scribendi AI. The three tools are vastly different from each other. However, all three have their strengths and weaknesses.
Grammarly is ideal for use in informal and professional contexts. However, it has limited utility for lengthy academic projects that use highly technical language. On the other hand, PerfectIt is suited for lengthy academic projects but lacks the grammar and spelling check functions of Grammarly.
Lastly, Scribendi AI is best used as a tool by professional editors. Although it has grammar and spelling functions like Grammarly does, it is too technical for a casual user.
Proofreading software tools are only as good as the person using them. This means that you should be well-read and informed on proper grammar and punctuation usage. For example, you should books that teach about punctuation and grammar, such as The Best Punctuation Book.
It’s not enough to blindly rely on proofreading software. Good luck with your research writing!
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2024, August 23). 3 Best Proofreading Software Tools. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/proofreading-software |
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