Whether learning remotely or in the classroom, writing assignments will always be a big part of the education experience. Though the ways in which students submit assignments might constantly be changing, they’re likely still responsible for creating essays, writing reports, or authoring other original content for any one of their classes. That’s where the subject of this week’s Rising Resources post comes in. For this week’s blog, we explored ProWritingAid, an online writing and grammar resource students can use to enhance their writing, check the style of their content, and strengthen their written content in the short-term as well as the long-term.
ProWritingAid is a unique technology tool and one that students can use in any learning environment. It helps them bolster key soft skills and they can add it to Chrome browsers as a free extension. To begin, users simply need to provide an email address and create a password to activate their ProWritingAid account. In addition to the Chrome extension, other extensions are available for Outlook, Microsoft Word, Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Open Office, Google Docs, and Scrivener. Plus, ProWritingAid can help students of all ages enhance their writing by referring to reports in the platform. The suggestions appear in a variety of ways, including articles, videos, and quizzes, which makes the writing journey more interactive.
Overall, ProWritingAid helps users become better writers by fostering a clearer understanding of grammar rules and having a writing style. It provides insights on everything from structure of sentences and flow of content to grammar insights that are always important. As we said, there is a free version of ProWritingAid, which includes a summarized report of key writing issues for users, the ability to edit up to 500 words at a time, and it’s available as an online tool. The Premium version includes unlimited words, a desktop version, and integrations for Word, Google Docs, Chrome, and Scrivener. And, the Premium+ version includes all of the features of the Premium version plus 50 plagiarism checks per year.
In addition to the grammar help, ProWritingAid can help students edit written content and improve clarity over time. The built-in editing tool serves as a resource to help student identify any words they might overuse, flaws with their sentence structure, inconsistencies with punctuation use, repetition of certain phrases, pacing, and readability. Some of these elements, we’re sure, aren’t things that many students (at any grade level) would consider when writing up assignments, but taking a little bit of time to correct highlighted flaws in their writing can go an incredibly long way in helping them develop good habits for writing like pros in the present and in the future. As students look for tools to help them improve their writing, ProWritingAid stands out among the strongest to use.
The platform analyzes student writing in such a way that other tools may not. While others tend to focus largely on pointing out grammatical mistakes, ProWritingAid is much more robust. It can identify certain weaknesses in student writing that a typical artificial technology might miss because they’re not grammatically incorrect. Students write in a number of different styles and the ProWritingAid software is truly valuable for all of them. One of these examples, highlighted on the ProWritingAid site, is improving on readability and efficiency. In this example, the software generates replacement options for ‘walk quickly’ to help make the sentence flow better. Suggestions appear in real time and help students think about how to use descriptive and attention-grabbing writing moving forward.
As for the reports, they help identify up to 20 specific areas within which writing can be improved. These include some very valuable insights into downfalls like vague wording, overcomplicating the structure of sentences, relying too much on adverbs, and utilizing a passive rather than active voice. Other insights the editing tools provide include helping students to identify clichés, transitions, diction, and overuse. These types of suggestions are designed to mirror feedback that professional copy editors would provide to their staff and, as you might expect, it can be used to strengthen many elements of student writing. By helping to minimize these common mistakes in writing, students would then be able to focus more on other aspects of writing, like developing a personal tone or advancing their own writing voice.
In using a tool like ProWritingAid, students will quickly pick up on the tendencies they have in their own writing and learn what other more efficient and engaging options they could be employing. The end goal is having them apply the techniques they’ve learned on their own and reduce the suggestions they receive. As a writer, credibility is important and publishing content with grammatical errors and stylistic shortcomings is how they're discredited.
While not so extreme, this can have a similar effect on student work, especially in the upper grades. ProWritingAid includes tools for helping in these situations, like word replacement tools, that go beyond simply finding synonyms for students. Right in the platform, students can find replacements, including synonyms, contextually related replacements, lists, alliteration, cliches, rhymes, collocations, anagrams, and more—something that’s very unique and could get to be pretty fun.
Beyond that, customization options are available within ProWritingAid, so, if there’s a certain style educators want students to follow, they can set that as a rule. Charts and graphs are also available for breaking down student writing in a way that’s easier for them to understand. One of those graphs provides students with a readability score for all pieces of writing they do. The readability is broken down into three categories: Easy-to-read paragraphs, slightly difficult-to-read paragraphs, and very difficult-to-read paragraphs. Helping them identify specific problem areas in their writing can ensure they address and ultimately correct them. It also provides students with a sentence variety score, a sentence length score, and identifies sentences that are too long.
Basically, students can use ProWritingAid to identify weaknesses in their writing that they likely never even knew they had. By accessing all available insights, students have a lot of options for improving their writing and developing a unique voice. To explore ProWritingAid more and thumb through the various plans they offer, we encourage you to check out their website. After that, browse our store for more innovative technology tools to help students develop 21st century STEM skills. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram for more!