How to use ProWritingAid in Scrivener
This post has been updated to reflect new features as of February 2024.
Scrivener is an amazing tool for writing novels, screenplays, nonfiction, poems, and short stories (among other things!), but with so many advanced editing tools out there, Scrivener users may be wondering if they can use their favorite editing tool directly within Scrivener while drafting and editing their work. For writers interested in using ProWritingAid, the answer is yes!
Fans of the text editing tool ProWritingAid have long been able to import Scrivener projects into the ProWritingAid Desktop App. This worked well for some, but others found the process offputting, preferring to streamline their writing process and limit themselves to working directly in Scrivener. After a recent update, now ProWritingAid can be used directly within Scrivener! Read on for instructions on how to set this up and use this popular and powerful grammar and style checker.
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Why use ProWritingAid?
If you’re not familiar with ProWritingAid, it’s a grammar and style checker with an education component to not only help you correct your writing but also teach you to get better at it.
ProWritingAid has features that are helpful for creative writers, professionals, students, teachers, and non-native speakers and has integrations for the web (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge extensions), Google Docs, Microsoft Office, and Scrivener, as well as a web portal and a desktop application that can be used in virtually any text editor.
The ProWritingAid website is also full of helpful resources like the Grammar Guide, free online Grammar Checker, Writing Techniques…you’ll find all of these under Resources in the navigation footer.
ProWritingAid Features
Most text editing tools, including Scrivener, include a native spellcheck tool, so why consider something like ProWritingAid? Well, ProWritingAid goes beyond simple grammar, spelling, and punctuation checks and includes a host of other features to save time, help with style, and provide feedback, including some very newly added AI features. We’ll take a look at a few highlighted features below, but you can take a look at all of the features ProWritingAid highlights for creative writers here.
AI Sparks
AI Sparks is ProWritingAid’s brand new ChatGPT integration with some really neat tools for creative writers like Add Sensory Details, Change Perspective (I think every fiction writer knows the woes and time-suck of switching POV), Tense Change, and Dialogue Generator. The Summarize tool is even handy for things like writing a Chapter or Scene Synopsis.
Obviously, privacy and data security is a chief concern for writers, so I checked with my contact at ProWritingAid to see if data used to run the AI Sparks tool is kept and used for training purposes. He said, “We have an exemption from Open AI, which means none of the text processes via PWA is stored or used for training.” This means that you’re actually getting unique privacy protections when using ProWritingAid’s AI Spark tool vs. something like the free version of ChatGPT online which I find to be a huge selling point, personally.
Critique Report
Critique Report is ProWritingAid’s other new AI tool. It’s designed to play the role of critique partner or developmental editor with on-demand, custom feedback about your story’s strengths and weaknesses and actionable tips for improving plot, characters, world, and narrative. This is great for people who may not have found writing friends yet, don’t have the budget for a developmental editor or professional beta reader, or even who just want an extra set of eyes or some immediate feedback to help get them unstuck or make some immediate improvements.
Word Explorer & Contextual Thesaurus
The Word Explorer and contextual thesaurus is a really neat tool for improving word choice and keeps you in your composition, not pulled out of your writing to flip through a book or do a Google search that’s bound to lead to a time-wasting rabbit hole. You also have some cool tools in here like Alliteration and Cliches.
Style Guides & Dictionaries
You can also create your own style guides and dictionaries which is a fantastic tool for consistency and saving time—no more looking back at how you referenced something before or the capitalization of a term. This tool can be used for everything from brand consistency to creating your own language systems and terms in your next fantasy novel.
Snippets
If you have certain things you type again and again, from the link to buy your book to a lengthy character name to a template for responding to email inquiries, Snippets is a great tool. No need to use a separate text expander—it’s built right into ProWritingAid. As someone who uses text-expanding snippets every single day in my day job and small business, I can tell you this time (and sanity)-saving tool is not to be overlooked.
ProWritingAid also has overused word check, passive voice detection, an author comparison tool, and so much more! ProWritingAid integrates with MS Word/Outlook, Google Docs, Scrivener, Open Office, and Final Draft and has browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari, so it’s available just about everywhere you’d want to write.
ProWritingAid Pricing
ProWritingAid currently has three plan options—Free, Premium, and Premium Pro—which can be billed on a monthly or yearly basis or as a one-time fee for a lifetime license.
Use coupon code JENT20 to get 20% off ProWritingAid. Click here to review the plan options and purchase if it seems like a good fit for you.
ProWritingAid Free Plan
It looks like ProWritingAid’s Free plan has been expanded a bit, which I love to see! The Free plan gives basic writing suggestions—grammar, spelling, and punctuation—on up to 500 words and includes the Word explorer and Thesaurus tools. You also now get 10 rephrases per day and 3 AI Sparks per day. This is a great way to try out ProWritingAid and see if you like it and may be sufficient for those needing something to check work emails or other small amounts of text. Generally, I would consider this more of a free trial without a time limit. You can sign up to try ProWritingAid for free here.
If you’re looking for a free forever with the option to upgrade spellchecker that you can also use within Scrivener, you might prefer this one.
ProWritingAid Premium Plan
ProWritingAid Premium is $10/month billed yearly at $120 if you do yearly billing, which is definitely the way to go on the Premium plan; paying monthly will cost you three times as much at $30/month. Since this post was originally written, it looks like the monthly price has increased by $10/month but the yearly price has remained the same.
Premium comes with all of ProWritingAid’s bells and whistles, including unlimited word count, unlimited rephrases, advanced style improvements, custom style guides, snippets, 24+ writing analysis reports, customizable writing suggestions, terminology management, author comparison, citations, collaboration, 1 critique per day, 5 AI Sparks per day, and unlimited document storage.
Premium goes beyond basic spelling and grammar to improve the style and strength of your writing by highlighting issues like passive voice, over-complicated sentence constructions, and lack of sentence length variation, vague wording, repetitiveness, and more.
prowritingaid Premium Pro
ProWritingAid Premium Pro comes with everything included in the Premium plan plus extended access to AI features.
Premium comes with 5 AI Sparks per day while Premium Pro comes with 50 AI Sparks per day.
Premium comes with 1 Critique per day while Premium Pro comes with 3 Critiques per day.
Compared to the cost of a Premium membership, Premium Pro costs an additional $6 per month on monthly billing, $2 per month on yearly billing or an additional $300 for a lifetime license.
Lifetime Payment Plan
Both the Premium and Premium Pro plans have a Lifetime license option. With this, instead of paying a monthly subscription or a yearly fee, you pay a larger one-time fee for lifetime access. Lifetime Premium is one-time payment of $399. Compared to the yearly premium plan rate, you’re using ProWritingAid’s premium tools “for free” after less than 3.5 years, so this is a great option for true ProWritingAid fans and/or people who are really opposed to taking on any more subscription fees (and honestly, I don’t blame you). Lifetime Premium Pro is $699.
Plagiarism Checks
If you’re in academia, you may need to perform plagiarism checks to get an originality report from time to time. ProWritingAid’s plagarism tool works through the online editing tool or the Microsoft Word Add-In and checks your work against over a million web-pages, published works, and academic papers. ProWritingAid does not store, share, or resell your text, ensuring that using this tool will not cause you trouble in the future.
You can buy plagiarism checks in bundles of 10, 100, 500, or 1,000 with 10 checks costing $10, 100 check (most popular plan) costing $40, and 1,000 checks costing $200 (best cost per check).
All paid options come with a 14-day money back guarantee, so you can safely try out premium features and, if ProWritingAid doesn’t live up to your expectations, request a refund within that time frame.
How to use ProWritingAid in Scrivener
Setting up ProWritingAid Everywhere
ProWritingAid Everywhere is a relatively new tool for Mac and Windows that will run in all of your favorite applications, including Scrivener—no need to import or connect documents as you did with ProWritingAid Desktop.
Go to the ProWritingAid Everywhere page for Windows or Mac and click the “Download Now” button at the top of the page. Note: Windows 10 version 1903 or newer or Windows 11 is required on Windows computers and macOS 10.13 or newer is required for Mac computers.
Double-click the download to start the installer and follow the installation prompts.
Optional: locate the ProWritingAid menu icon near the time corner (bottom right for Windows, upper right for Mac) and click it to access the Settings menu. Here you can do things like set the language to Canadian English, Australian English, British English, US English, or General English, choose which apps ProWritingAid will run in, update your style guides, and more.
Using ProWritingAid in Scrivener
When your cursor is active in the Main Editor, you’ll see a little dot at the bottom of the screen. When you hover over that dot, you’ll have three option: a power button which you can click to hide underlines or disable ProWritingAid, the Reports button, and the Suggestions button.
The ProWritingAid dot will change colors to indicate that serious issues need review—you’ll see in the screenshots above, the button is still teal when there is just one suggestion about what ProWritingAid considers to be an overused word, but the button is orange when there are multiple issues, including a couple of “unknown words” i.e. significant misspellings. When you click on a suggestion to review it, the related text will be highlighted, making suggestions easy to review and either accept, ignore, or make a bigger change like add a word to the dictionary or disable a rule. You may also see certain corrections underlined and can hover over those to see the suggested changes and either accept or ignore them.
A feature just added in February of 2024 is the ability to view reports in ProWritingAid Everywhere, rather than having to navigate to the web portal. This means you can run and read a report of all 28 things ProWritingAid analyzes for directly from within Scrivener!
Highlight some text to access the Rephrase and AI Sparks tools.
Standard rephrase will simply give you alternative ways to say the same thing, but you can click through the options on the left to see more options like shorten, expand, and focus on sensory details.
Select AI Sparks and then the action you want performed. Here, I had ProWritingAid change a paragraph written in third person to first person.
To use the Rephrase and AI Sparks tools, highlight whatever text you want the AI to look at and click on the option you want to use. You can see Rephrase in action in the screenshot above on the left. In the screenshot above on the right, I selected a paragraph written in third person and used the AI Sparks option to make it first person. I can choose the option to copy the text, have ProWritingAid replace my existing text with the suggested text, or try again if I don’t like the output. You’ll also see a counter of your allowed number of AI Sparks for the day based on the ProWritingAid plan you’re on.
Checking Scrivener’s spellcheck settings
If you leave the “Check Spelling While Typing” Scrivener feature on, you will end up getting suggestions from both Scrivener and ProWritingAid. You may or may not want that.
To turn Scrivener’s “Check Spelling While Typing” feature on or off, go to Edit → Spelling and Grammar. You can check additional Corrections settings by going to Scrivener → Settings/Preferences → Corrections on Mac or File → Options → Corrections on Windows.
Final Notes
If you’ve previously used Grammarly for Desktop, you will need to turn Grammarly off in order for ProWritingAid Everywhere to pop up, but it’s not necessary to uninstall Grammarly altogether. If you’re comparing/contrasting to see which you like better, you can keep them both installed until you decide; you’ll just need to manage which is on and active at any given time.
If you write in Scrivener and are looking for help editing and proofreading your own writing or adding the functionality of an AI assistant, give ProWritingAid a try and see what you think! Don’t forget to use coupon code JENT20 to get 20% off at checkout.
Have you tried ProWritingAid with Scrivener yet? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments.
Grammarly more your speed? See How to Use Grammarly with Scrivener.
