- So you wanna know how to check your English grammar
with the ProWritingAid app,
then we're gonna go ahead and deep dive into that today.
What is ProWritingAid first?
Well, in their words, it's a grammar checker style editor
and writing mentor in one package.
Full disclosure.
This video is fully sponsored by ProWritingAid,
but the nice thing is they've allowed me carte blanche
to share all of my honest thoughts
and some of the really cool features
I like about the grammar checking app.
You can get free access or 20% off premium access
when you visit the sponsored link over
at dalelinks.com/prowritingaid.
Okay, so they've got all integrations known to man.
This includes Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Scrivener,
Open Office, Chrome, Firefox, and so much more.
You actually find that on the main landing page
for ProWritingAid.
Today, we're just gonna focus on Microsoft Word.
If you happen to be using Open Office
it'll be fairly intuitive.
Same thing, Google Docs.
Here's how you set things up.
You're gonna go over to dalelinks.com/prowritingaid
and set up an account.
Go to the main landing page by clicking
the ProWritingAid logo in the top left corner,
download and install the add-in for Microsoft Word.
Once the add-in is completely installed,
restart Microsoft Word if it was already open,
if it's not, you can just start it on up,
sign into your ProWritingAid account from there
and now you can just start editing.
Now our example today is gonna be roughly
an 1100 word manuscript
that I had help in putting together a blog,
and it's gonna be in another video,
I'll share with that sometime here very, very soon.
Anything below 10,000 words,
ProWritingAid handles with no issues.
Now it tends to be a little slower
and a little bit more laggy
when you go above 10,000 words.
Now it's not terrible.
It just means it's gonna take a little longer
to go through your longer document.
So for this 1100 word one, it's gonna go pretty fast.
Let's get behind the dashboard.
So it's kind of nice, when you get a suggestion on here,
when you do the little dropdown,
it's gonna show you a couple of different options.
Now, for some reason, you're like you disagree with it,
you can always ignore it, you can also do
what's called the disable rule meaning that
if there's some type of a vernacular
in your writing that you want to keep,
let's say for instance, some type of slang,
you can always put the disable rule.
Now it will give you a warning
when you have the disable rule,
it says are you sure you want to disable this rule?
This change will be permanent.
Now I'm not sure how we go back and fix that.
I'm sure it might be under settings per writing.
They might have that inside your actual dash,
but I'm gonna say no,
because usually I try to leave these things on,
so I never use disable rule,
and then, you've got the two different choices.
You can always go in here and fix it yourself,
but usually, when you want to say,
for instance, just keep it to what it is,
so it says you're going to lose a little bit in the process.
It's telling me it's a little redundant,
a little bit redundant, see what I did there.
So what I'm gonna do is just go a little in the process.
Boom and it went ahead and processed that.
(bright music)
Okay, so if you wanted to do just a quick and dirty cleanup,
that was one of the fast ways to do it.
The nice thing is there's actually more.
You can go further deeper down.
Now I'm just gonna say this that right away,
ProWriting is fantastic for doing editing.
However, if you're planning to publish this work,
I would almost always recommend that you get a human editor
after doing ProWritingAid.
It's fantastic, but there's still a human editor aspect
that you want to involve in it.
But let's say you're like, Dale, I can't afford that.
What we're gonna do is we're gonna use
some of these other reports.
So I'm gonna start way back up here
at the top of my documents
since I burned through everything that I need to,
we're gonna go ahead and look for repeat.
So we're gonna hit all repeats.
It's processing the text.
Okay, so now it's really gone deep into things.
So frequent 15 word phrases
to share you five simple ways, ooh, okay.
So it's a little bit of repetition,
but that's for good reason
'cause it will be part of a blog post,
so I may not remove that one,
so we're just gonna hide that.
Close that on up.
Let's see what this one is.
Simple ways to make money on Fiverr with or without skills.
Same thing.
We're gonna go ahead and ignore that one.
So if you're like, nah, I don't, ooh, okay,
so apparently I had said it twice.
Hmm, let's, now let's just say you're like,
nah, I don't really want to.
Why don't we do this one instead?
So it gives us a different way
to where it's not so redundant.
And in the event that we just don't want this,
we can always just ignore the suggestion.
We could just close it on out.
So we can go through all the repeats and such.
That's fantastic.
Now let's go into some other areas.
Let's take a look at structure.
Now right away, you could see a lot of recommendations.
40% of the sentences start with the subject compared
to 61% in published writing.
Sentences start with the subject, okay.
So it's gonna show us this,
where it needs to be fixed.
Ooh, look how wordy that sentence is.
So it picked out something that may be a little too long.
So let's go ahead, I'm gonna break this sentence up.
Okay, so let's just say we've gone through this report,
and we've burned through each one of these things,
we can go into other areas.
So let's take a look at, let's say consistency.
So it's only capitalization consistency
that it's flagging here.
Ooh, so it popped something up here
that my writer did a little bit wrong
where it had blog capitalized and one not capitalized.
And I think, for whatever reason, she must have thought
that doing capitalized letter for blog made sense,
but in this event, I don't find it to make sense whatsoever,
and not sure why this is an all caps.
It's like you're shouting at someone when you're doing that.
So fantastic, we've got all of them fixed.
We can always just hit that consistency again,
and that one blog should be gone, so there we go.
Wonderful, and then we can go through
each one of these things and figure out, okay,
do some of these things make sense?
So for instance, on this particular one,
it's a little bit of a false positive
because here is the title, "Prayer and Positive Thoughts,"
because it's a title we're gonna leave that as is,
so in this event, what we're gonna do is
we're just gonna ignore the suggestion.
In the event that we want to report a incorrect suggestion,
we can always put something like that in there,
let ProWritingAid know.
In this particular instance, I mean,
I could have reported it, but to be honest with you,
it's just a small infraction.
It's not gonna make too much of a difference.
So we're gonna go ahead and just hide that, collapse it,
okay, same thing we can look through.
Let's see spokesperson, again,
so maybe what we can do is report incorrect suggestion,
so I'm gonna go ahead and click on this.
I used the word in a subtitle,
or actually in a,
we'll say chapter title,
and it was used again in the content,
it's triggering,
I can't see the rest of my text here,
a false positive.
All right, there we go, and we'll just send feedback.
Done, so it's not perfect,
but if you give some recommendations over to ProWritingAid,
they'll tweak some of those things
so it better works for you.
So we could go through each one of these things,
again, this will probably take a little bit of time,
but let's go ahead, let's take a look at plagiarism.
So I'm gonna go ahead and do a check here, now keep in mind,
plagiarism is for one of the higher premium accounts
and you're allowed up to, I think,
two in the course of a year.
So, um, or two in the course of a month,
I can't remember for sure.
Okay, so the plagiarism check
has pulled back some information.
What it does is it scrapes all online articles.
It says 1.4% non-original text found.
0% or zero non-original quoted.
Okay, so, really at this point, it's showing, and okay,
so, and I will say nothing one way or the other,
whether that's going to be a good or a bad thing,
but there's a demand for it,
so that's a pretty common statement,
so someone probably said it on one of these articles before,
to be honest, I think it's rather forgivable.
Some of you might be wondering
why do I want to do a plagiarism check
if I wrote my own work?
Good, good point.
The nice thing is if you're publishing content
over to Amazon KDP
and you have too many of those specific triggers,
KDP is gonna push your stuff back in saying
they found your content freely available online.
So I would say in instances like this,
I would want to go through and reformat that sentence
and say it a little bit differently,
so that way, we pull out that false positive.
There's so many other things that we can utilize.
One of the things I would just recommend to you is
in the event you find some feature on ProWritingAid,
it's not working or you can't find a specific feature,
you can always hit the feedback button right here,
and it'll drop you on over into ProWritingAid,
and then you can go ahead and fill out all the information
and even do a little bit of search
and see if you have some solutions here.
I've never had to use this.
I've been super happy with ProWritingAid
since I've been using it.
Hey, again, get free access or 20% off premium access
when you go to our sponsored link,
dalelinks.com/ProWritingAid.
Link's down inside the description down below,
and by the way,
how does ProWritingAid measure up to, say, Grammarly?
Actually, I talk about that here in this video right here
or you can also take a look at this video
that YouTube recommended to you.
I will see you in either one.