Free Proofreading Tool

[Paul Whybrow]

Several of us use Grammarly to catch mistakes in our manuscripts.

This morning, I found another free online tool that hunts out dubious grammar and spelling. Proofread.bot works well and catches glitches that Grammarly misses, offering more of an explanation as to why there's an error.

Other tools can be found in the article How To Easily Proofread and Edit Your Own eBook, from the Digital Reader web-site, whose free newsletter is worth subscribing to:

How To Easily Proofread And Edit Your Own eBook | The Digital Reader

 

[AliG]

Thanks, Paul. That's very useful. What size chunks of prose will they take? Some are limited, I believe.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I'm not sure if the app has a file size limit but it's coped well with the 3,000 word short stories I've checked.

I like it, for how it catches punctuation errors that Grammarly misses, but it can be flakey to get working—just sitting there, ignoring what you've cut & pasted.

Also, the tone of the advice that it gives feels like being ticked-off by a professor of English, as it quotes advice from Strunk & White's Elements of Style like it's sacrosanct—rather than a very dated set of rules that were last updated in 1959.