As the owner of a leading proofreading company in the UK, a children’s book publisher and author, it’s safe to say that I am a big fan of the English language. I firmly believe that all company owners should invest in ensuring that their written communications are polished and professional. Ideally, you would pay a professional proofreader like myself to correct your spelling, grammar and punctuation errors, both offline and online.
On the other hand, I also understand that modern apps and AI can save people time in perfecting their writing. I’d also be lying if I didn’t state that I myself rely on numerous websites, apps and programs to assist my proofreading and also my own writing. So in this blog I will share a few of the best apps for improving your writing skills.
Microsoft Word
Sure, other word processing programs exist, but MS Word is still by far the most widely used software for creating text documents on a computer. It is also useful for proofreading for two main reasons: its spellcheck tool (which is now called Editor) and it’s Track Changes function. When you type in MS Word it will flag up spelling and grammatical errors as you type by putting a red squiggle under the offending text.
You can also click on the Editor button to run through the document and clean up any mistakes that it finds. Be wary, though, because sometimes MS Word gets it wrong. English is a very complex language, and a computer can’t match the human brain when it comes to detecting nuance and context.
Track Changes is the single most important tool for proofreaders and editors around the world. By turning this function on, any changes you then make to your document will be highlighted clearly using red mark-up. If you delete a word, a balloon will appear on the right-hand side of the screen to show you. We take it for granted these days, but it truly is an indispensable tool that revolutionised the proofreading industry. It’s hard to imagine life before it, when you had to rely on printing documents out and using BSI symbols!
Google Docs
While I am a huge fan of Microsoft Word, it’s hard to ignore the benefits of online word processors such as Google Docs. The major advantage of Google Docs is that you can edit a document online, and other users can see your changes and comments in real time. This is particularly useful in business, of course, where multiple people may need to check and sign off a document before it’s published.
Google Docs’ equivalent of Track Changes isn’t as good as Word’s, because it uses strikethrough rather than balloons to show you what has been deleted, but I expect they will update this at some point. It’s an undeniably strong program for proofreading, though. I should point out that Office 365 provides an online version of Word as well, which has the same real-time functionality as Google Docs and also uses strikethrough rather than balloons at this point in time.
Grammarly
There are myriad writing assistant tools on the market with new ones popping up all the time, but Grammarly is by far the most populark, with over 10 million people using it each day.
There is a free version that detects spelling, grammar, punctuation and conciseness issues, while the premium version delves much deeper, helping you perfect all aspects of your writing including clarity-focused sentence rewrites, tone adjustments, plagiarism detection, word choice, formality level, fluency and additional advanced suggestions.
It is probably overkill for most business owners and can often overcomplicate matters, but for those that take their writing seriously and want to perfect their craft, Grammarly is well worth considering.
PerfectIt
PerfectIt is a paid-for program that works as an add-on to Word and speeds up the writing process by automating lots of checks for you. So if you’re producing formal documents such as contracts, technical documents, proposals, articles, books and reports, PerfectIt can check various aspects of the document on your behalf, such as checking consistency, house style rules, locating undefined abbreviations, and ensuring UK, US, CA or AU English is used throughout. This frees up your time to focus on your words and their meaning.
Ludwig
Ludwig is a superb program and one of the most useful ones available for improving your writing. If you have written a sentence and have doubts about whether it reads well or means what you want it to mean, you can search for it on Ludwig and it will tell you if it’s the best way to write it, offering you contextualised examples taken from reliable sources. So it’s essentially a grammar search engine, and like any good search engine it’s a very quick way to find answers to your questions.
These are just five of many useful proofreading programs available online. While I would argue that nothing will ever beat using a professional proofreading company, these programs among others are all worth considering if you want to perfect your written English.
By Nick Jones, proofreader, editor, author and managing director of Full Proof and Full Media Ltd.
Interesting related article: “What is an App?“