What do the learned members of this forum recommend from their experience as the best tool to use for AI editing, Grammerly, ProWritingAid, or some other tool? I have not used Grammerly in years and never used any other. So do not know the current state of the art.
I would prefer something that works well with Scrivener because I like to do as much as possible in Scrivener before exporting to another format.
I am using a MBP.
And of course a human would do the final edits and polishing of the manuscript. But wanted to see if any of these tools could speed up the process.
I use Grammarly but then again, I haven’t tried (or researched other tools.) It doesn’t integrate with Scrivener (as far as I know) and I wish it would.
My process involves cut and paste. It’s not as optimal as I would like.
I use ProWritingAid. It can open and edit Scrivener files directly, but since the Scrivener format isn’t really documented, there’s a risk that it’ll break something.
I haven’t had problems with this yet, but then again I don’t make big changes that way. The main downside, for me, is that when you open a Scrivener project in PWA, you only see the text of the manuscript, but not the notes or the synopsis. And you can’t open the project in Scrivener at the same time. Often, while I’m brooding over the advice from PWA, I want to add a note to myself to review something later - but can’t.
So most of the time, I keep the project open in Scrivener and copy&paste to/from the PWA web app. I really wish Scrivener had a plugin API that would allow apps like PWA official access to the project. PWA have a plugin for Word and they went through the trouble of writing a desktop app that can open Scrivener projects, so I’m sure they’d happily adopt that.
I currently have the new free version of Grammarly open when I write/edit in Scrivener for the live suggestions. I do also have the premium version of PWA which I run in later editing.
Important to consider recommendations by both as just that, RECOMMENDATIONS. They both often get it wrong with some of their recommendations.
The official mechanism for third-party access to Scrivener projects is Scrivener’s Sync with External Folder feature. Direct access to a project with any tool other than Scrivener itself is unsupported and entirely at your own risk.
Strange. Have run multiple Mac/Win installs of the new version without issue.
I am VERY cautious and watching what it gets up to. I have caught it a couple of times claiming an error still exists after correction and not aligning with a full word, but only a couple and I’ve given it a right thrashing - checking over $200k words in a couple of projects.
As with all such tools not every recommendation is correct. I ran it through the Tutorial and it had a field day with claimed errors :).
I’ll try it again, may be it doesn’t like the macOS version I am running (High Sierra).
Exactly. I just finished the 2nd draft and my main concern is the big picture of where the paper is going not the details like grammar and spelling. And considering that it contains a lot of diacritics and Sanskrit transliterations there are going to be a lot of false negatives.
May just dust off my (digital) copy of Strunk and White and related texts and DIY.
This text came highly recommended but I am reluctant to get yet another text in the same vein as S&W.
Oh yeah, another one to consider is whitesmoke.com. It was one of the first, if not THE first, standalone checker (Whitesmoke 2001, Grammarly 2009, ProWritingAid 2011).
Their website is badly in need of a refresh, but the reviews are still good for it.
Is there any tool someone has used, other than ProWriting Aid, where we can NOT loose our formatting? I use subheads, and have images, and lots of bullet lists, and I hate to have to re-create everything back in Scrivener after a grammar check.
