6 Best Proofreading Software Tools
- Melchior Antoine
- Aug 23, 2024
- 12 min read
Updated: Jun 19
Proofreading software can make your writing easier and more efficient in addition to reducing the errors in your essay or blog. 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 apps 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 six here:
QuillBot
Wordvice AI
PaperPal
Grammarly
PerfectIt
Scribendi AI
These are software that I have personal experience with. Just for a quick summary. These software editing programs are not just proofreading applications. They are AI-powered writing assistants. PerfectIt is one of the more traditional proofreading tools designed for academic writing. It can be safely described as a proofreading tool and not an AI-powered writing assistant.
Grammarly is an AI-powered application that is ideal for blogs and informal writing. However, QuillBot, Wordvice AI, Paperpal, and, to a limited extent, the Scribendi proofreader are ideal for academic writing and editing.
Read on to learn more about the benefits of each of these proofreading software applications and how you can use them in your academic writing.
Disclosure: The post may contain affiliate links. This means I get a commission if you decide to purchase through my links.
1. QuillBot
QuillBot is a proofreading tool that began as paraphrasing software. This means it was used primarily to rephrase text to avoid plagiarism. In short, it was a tool ideal for students and other professionals in academia. Today, its features include a grammar checker in addition to a plagiarism checker.
QuillBot's Grammar Checker is free. It's multilingual and caters to at least five languages:
English
French
German
Portuguese
Spanish
However, its grammar checker is only one of the suite of applications that the AI-powered has available in its arsenal, as I mentioned earlier. In addition to the free grammar checker, it has an 1. AI Detector; 2. Paraphraser; 3. Plagiarism Checker; 4. Summarizer; 5. Translator; and Citation Generator.
In short, QuillBot carries the ideal suite of tools for university students and professionals in academia. The AI Detector can help you determine the likelihood of your essay being AI-generated. This has become a big issue, with many universities frowning on AI-generated content and even penalizing students for it.
The Paraphraser, Plagiarism Checker, and Summarizer also assist in protecting you from another one of the great taboos or misdeeds of academic writing, that is, plagiarized content. The tool provides a suite of services ideal for university students.
When writing your academic essay or research paper, you can use Quillbot to ensure that your AI and plagiarism scores are passable. It also helps with summarizing and paraphrasing the abstracts and major ideas from papers that you read, while providing proper citation formats using the citation generator.
To summarize, QuillBot is most suitable as a suite for those in academia, that is, students, researchers, professors, and so on. The applications should not be seen as a simple grammar checker or proofreader but as an entire package alongside its paraphrasing, summarizing, and plagiarism-checking functions.
The pricing for QuillBot is arranged according to two plans: Free and Premium. The free plan, as expected has restricted features. For example, you can paraphrase only up to 125 words. However, the Premium Plan has unlimited features. The payment options are Annual, Quarterly, and Monthly. The Annual Plan is cheapest at $8.33 per month. The Quarterly Plan is $13.31 per month, and the Monthly Plan is $19.95 per month.
2. Wordvice
The Wordvice AI tool is superior to 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 on which it was trained.
In the case of Wordvice Ai, they developed and trained a software application based on the work of highly qualified professional editors editing millions of words. Therefore, you can describe it as the product of the hive brain of efficient and highly trained editors.
Wordvice is a proofreading and editing service that specializes in editing academic content. This means things like:
Academic essays
Research papers
Journal papers
White papers
Thesis and dissertation manuscripts
Think of the proofreading function in Microsoft Word but on steroids. The tool is meant to fix errors both in academic writing and business writing. Although, in my opinion, it is ideal for academic text.
If you are in academia, you will find this tool just right for you. It allows you to carry out real-time editing while drafting the early stages of your essay or research paper.
Another awesome thing about Wordvvice AI is that it provides the option of human editing assistance. There is a seamless flow or switch between the software and human editors. Wordvice is a popular proofreading service with over 500 human editors.
The app can be used alongside Wordvice's reliable team of human editors. When you feel that you have done the best you can using the AI tool, you can simply get in touch for help from a friendly professional editor.
In addition to this, the app also has a suite of tools, including their 1. AI Parapharser, 2. AI Summarizer, 3. AI Plagiarism Checker, 4. AI Detector, and 5. AI translator. In short, it's not just a proofreading application. It is also an AI-powered writing assistant.
Wordvice has a Free basic plan that includes most of the features but is restricted. The Premium Plan comes in three payment options that are priced differently:
Annual: $9.95/month
Semi-Annual: $15.95/month
Monthly: $19.95/month
The Wordvice AI allows you to edit text by pasting it into its web page-based interface. However, it also allows you to download your document as a Word file and other formats. Lastly, more importantly, it has a Word plug-in that allows you to use its features directly in Word.
3. Paperpal
Paperpal is a sister company to Editage. They are also a professional proofreading service. Just like Wordvice and QuillBot, it is an application that is ideal for the academic. It is also not just a proofreader. The software can also be described as an AI-powered assistant.
It also includes a suite of AI-powered services:
AI Writer
Paraphraser
Citation Generator
Plagiarism Checker
Summarizer
Translator
The Paperpal AI tool is efficient in academic writing because it like a few other applications in this review is trained on the right data. According to the company, "Paperpal's advanced AI, trained on published scholarly content and backed by 21+ years of STM experience." STM stands for science, technology, and medicine.
This means that the tool can understand and preserve academic context when suggesting changes, and it is ideal for you if you work in any of these industries.
It is a writing assistant tool that is appropriate for students, researchers, and academics. You can use it from the very beginning to the end of the research writing process. This means the following:
Brainstorming ideas
Generating outlines
Increasing your writing output
This means the software is an ally if fighting writer's block. Paperpal offers both a Free Plan and Premium Plan. The Free Plan of course has limited fetaures. For example, five uses per day of AI features such as paraphrasing and citation.
The Premium plan has three pricing options: 1. Annual at $11.50 per month; 2. Quarterly at $18.30 per month; and 3. Monthly at $25 per month. This tool unlike QuillBot has a research repository of 250 M articles. In addition, like QuillBot it can be used as a plug-in for Microsoft Word; however, unlike QuillBot, it can also be used with Overleaf and supports LaTeX documents.
4. 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.
5. PerfectIt
PerfectIt is designed as a stylistic editing guide. What does this mean? The app'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.
6. 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 in the hands of professional editors and proofreaders. Nonetheless, students and academics who have a fair grasp of academic writing may find it useful.
I recommend this to be used primarily as an application for professional editors working on academic documents. 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.
This means the app has been trained on actual input by highly qualified editors. The Scribendi proofreading 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.
The role of AI proofreading in the copy editing process
AI editing or proofreading tools can be quite useful during the editing process. Most proofreading services employ proofreading tools in their editing process. These tools are available for the use of everyone: from professional editors to amateurs with limited writing and editing skills.
However, they work best in the hands of a professional editor. To learn more about a cautious approach to using AI tools for editing, please check out this prior article: Using AI for Content Creation. Nonetheless, these tools can be properly used even before you hire an editor. You should first consider the three editing stages to make sure that you use them properly:
The Processing Stage
The Copy editing Stage
The Proofing Stage
In the Processing Stage, the editor prepares your manuscript for copyediting. The Copy editing Stage is involves the actual work of correcting the work line by line happens. The Proofing Stageis where the editors goes through the copyedited manuscript to uncover small errors to ensure that the final document is as perfect as possible.
The processing stage is the mechanical stage of copyediting. It can be carried out without even thinking. This means that you don't have to be a professional editor to carry out this stage. This is where professional editing software becomes useful.
But you should be careful not to use just any AI-powered software tool for this process. An excellent proofreading tool for this purpose would be PerfectIt. PerfectIt actually belongs to an older generation of proofreading software. It may not even be described as AI-powered.
In this stage of copyediting, the editor will:
Turn double spaces into single spaces
Turn double hyphens into em dashes
Turn hyphens between numbers into en dashes
Turn underlined words into italicized words
Place punctuation marks inside quotation marks
The right proofreading software allows you to achieve these things with the click of a button. In fact, you may not even need an editor to do this for you and you can carry this out yourself.
Copy editing is where the actual work of the professional editor begins. The editor has the task of reviewing every word or sentence for correction. In the processing stage, the work can be described as mechanical or robot-like. The editor puts no thought into what they do. However, in this stage, the editor has to use their judgement to decide:
Whento make big changes to sentence structure
When to ask for clarification from the author through comments and queries
When to deviate from the style guide
For example, the author may be using US English. However, there are instances where UK English may be appropriate, such as when using trade or brand names. The editor's job is to carefully go through the document and make the necessary changes. This process is manual and proofreading software may not be used extensively.
Proofing is the final stage of copyediting services. It comes after copyediting. No matter how careful and skilled the editor, they likely missed a few errors. Professional editors usually allow the document to "rest" for some time. This could range between a few days to a week, depending on the schedule you are working with.
In this process, the editor picks up anything that was missed in the copyediting stage. It can also occur after a review of the copyedited manuscript by the author. In this stage, it also makes sense to use proofreading software such as PerfectIt.
Get in touch now to get assistance in proofreading and editing your work |
Proofreading software is not always enough
There are a wide range of proofreading software tools. I chose six of them — QuillBot, Wordvice AI, Paperpal, Grammarly, PerfectIt, and Scribendi AI. The six apps 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, Wordvice AI, QuillBot, Paperpal, and Scribendi's proofreading software are best suited for academics and students, as well as professional editors. However, you should remember that proofreading software tools are only as good as the person using them.
This means either one of two things. You should recognize the need for an editor, when necessary. You can do this by hiring the services of a professional copy editing company or an individual editor. You should first determine the type of editor you need, whether it be a technical editor, academic editor, or literary or book editor.
This also means that you should be well-read and informed on proper grammar and punctuation usage. For example, you should read 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 writing!
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2024, August 23). 6 Best Proofreading Software Tools. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/proofreading-software |
