Speaker 1: It's easy to proofread an article blog post or an essay when you have the right software or is it hi there My name is Brian Collins. Welcome to the become a writer today channel I love testing writing software and I've spent months trying different types of grammar checker tools and Proofreading software that you can use to work on your book chapters articles and essays There are so many of them out there and many more coming out every day Some are free and some cost quite a bit of money. Which ones should you use and which ones should you try? In this video I'm going to profile six of the best proofreading tools that will work for you and your budget and for your needs. Hope you enjoy the content in this video. If you do hit thumbs up and to get more videos like this then don't forget to subscribe to the channel. Zifflo is a type of proofing software that you can use if you work with other team members in your business, if you want to prove other media like videos, or if you simply want to collaborate with other people before you publish something online. I took out a trial of Zifflow for the purposes of this video. Here's what you need to know. Firstly, pricing. You can work with an unlimited amount of reviewers and you can review any type of creative, whether it's PDF, Word documents, Google Docs, and even video files, which I'll show you in a moment. It also has advanced tools for proofreaders like version management, And if you're working on creative media, which I mentioned a few minutes ago, you can integrate with Adobe Final Cut and so on. And you can also use it to actually manage the review process and approval process. Let's go over to the account that I took out for the purposes of this video. So I went ahead and uploaded a couple of different documents into Zifflow. I added a couple of YouTube videos because I work with a YouTube video editor who helps me prepare videos like this for publication. And I also uploaded an article from my website. Now it's pretty easy to create a proof to create ones like the ones just here. Simply click create proof and then you're going to either paste in a url or you're going to add a pdf document or video or some other sort of media. So if for example I went to the become a writer today site I could simply pick an article at random. I could paste it in here and then click add and then it will just take a few moments to generate a proof. Now it does take a little bit longer to create a proof if it's video, so do bear that in mind. But for a website or for PDF, it probably takes two or three minutes. So while it's doing that, I'm gonna go over and show you one of the other proofs that I created previously. So this is a webpage that I uploaded before I started this video. And you can see here that it has a public URL. So I can give this URL to anybody to proof without having a Zifflow account, or alternatively, I can actually share access with them over email, and then I'll get an email notification. Once they open the proof, here's what they get. It's basically a version of the document that anybody can annotate with comments. So I can click add comment, highlight the section that I want to rewrite, and I can paste in a note for the person who wrote this article, or I could paste in my own copy, or I could potentially put an attachment, like if I had a PDF or some other media that I wanted them to review, post this comment, and then I could work my way down through the article, highlighting the different sections that I want changed as part of the proofreading process. And then when I'm done, I could either make a decision if I had no comments, if I was perfectly happy with it, and I can mark this as approved. And then this will be reflected in my ZiffFlow accounts that I showed you a few minutes ago. It is worth bearing in mind that unlike some of the other proofreading software that I'll feature in this video, ZiffFlow is not going to have like a grammar checker, a plagiarism checker, or any of those tools. This is more for somebody who wants to collaborate with a video editor or a copywriter, but they know what edits they want to make themselves. So as an example, a couple of years ago, I worked as a copywriter for a software company, and we would often use tools like this to proof web pages and materials for marketing campaigns before they went live to ensure the brand messaging and tone of voice was correct. In other words, for things that a typical grammar checker wouldn't catch. So if you're a proofreader or require proofreading software and you want to work with other people and you need some sort of workflow management, this will be the tool that you can use simply because you can give people URLs that they can use to annotate and also because you can manage the approval process prior to something going live or being published. Grammarly is a type of proofreading software that you've undoubtedly used and which you're already familiar with thanks to how successful the free version of Grammarly is. However, the premium version of Grammarly has some additional tools which proofreaders will have great benefit from. So firstly, if you review any documents, you can accept multiple changes at once by clicking the first dialog box that appears on screen. But a proofreader also gets access to a plagiarism checker. Now, why would a proofreader need a plagiarism checker? Well, one of your jobs as a proofreader is to help your clients avoid accidental plagiarism, whereby they cite somebody and then they accidentally remove the citation, or perhaps they paraphrase somebody, but they forgot to include a link or a reference. So you can help them avoid getting into trouble by running a plagiarism check on documents that you paste into Grammarly. And that's something that I would do all the time. There is a big caveat, of course, to using Grammarly for proofreading. If the document is more than several thousand words long, you'll need to paste in individual sections as there is a cap on how much you can put into Grammarly. I also like it because it has a readability score. Sometimes as a proofreader, you may want to make something that's easy to read, that has a high readability score, and this report can help you do just that. You can also use it to adjust writing goals as part of the proofreading process. For example, is it meant for general audience, knowledgeable audience or expert audience? What's the formality? What's the domain and what's the intent of the article? Changing each one of these settings will reflect the checks and suggested changes that appear on the right-hand sidebar. Grammarly also has a web app, which is what I have on screen, but they also have a desktop app or plugin that you can use. So Grammarly basically works everywhere and anywhere on your desktop. Now, I've been a Grammarly business customer for years. I consider it a key type of proofreading software. I use it to proofread my own articles and I also use it to proofread articles that freelancers write for their websites that I run. I consider it invaluable, and I've also given access to other team members. I'm able to do that because in Grammarly Business, there is a setting in the administration panel whereby you can share access with team members to their email, and then you can see how often they're using Grammarly and turn on or off access as you see fit. You do have to pay per user, so it can get expensive. As a proofreader, I also particularly like the style guide. So if I have custom terms, I can add them to Grammarly. Here's one example here I put in for the purposes of this video. I sometimes write content about cryptocurrency. HODL is a term in the cryptocurrency space, that's H-O-D-L. That's often seen as a typo and grammar mistake by traditional grammar checking software. So I've added this to the Grammarly style guide as a rule that should not be changed in any articles or documents that I, or another proofreader that's working for me, would change because it would change the context of what I'm trying to say. You can also adjust your writing style inside of Grammarly based on APA, MLA, and Chicago manual of style. Grammarly is a good choice for proofreading software simply because it's easy to use. It works everywhere. The main downsides are it can get a little bit expensive if you want to share access with lots of different team members. And also there is a cap on how many documents you can put in. It would also be great to see Grammarly offer some sort of citation manager at some point. I get that many writers don't want to use Grammarly for various reasons, or perhaps they just simply want an alternative that has additional reports. Enter ProWritingAid, which costs approximately $70 per year and claims over 2 million authors, editors, copywriters, and of course, proofreaders. It works much like Grammarly, with web apps, desktop apps, and plugins for your various writing apps. For purposes of this video, I'm going to use the Web Editor. What works pretty similar to Grammarly in that you can just paste in a document and then ProWritingAid will just scan it automatically for grammar and spelling mistakes and for compliance with your own style guide, which you can create or adjust. So I click on this section here, you can go over to the ProWritingAid style guide, and then I can start to add items to it. So I can add in custom terms like hodl, or I can even add in custom sentences, or perhaps a specific terminology to my business that I could use when I'm proofreading, I will put these here as well. Now ProWritingAid has a number of different reports for proofreaders. As a proofreader, you're obviously going to be using grammar report, but perhaps you're also providing some line editing and copy editing services, in which case you may want to use the overused words report. I've already run it on this particular document, but it will highlight words like make or little or very that are unnecessary in the documents that you should remove. You can also run a sentence structure report, and it will give you information about how your sentences are structured and some suggestions that you can use to fix them. I use the readability report quite a bit, so it's identified too difficult to read paragraphs. Here's one here. This sentence here, this paragraph here is quite difficult to read, which would make sense because there's some terminology specific to cryptocurrency. So I may want to consider rewording this or rephrasing the sentence. If you're writing kind of more literary works, you can also use a cliche finder to find and identify cliches in your works and potentially remove them. This works quite well for dialogue. There are lots of other reports that you can use too. That's probably the only real downside of ProWritingAid. As a proofreader, the sheer number of reports can get a little bit overwhelming. So I would say to you to focus on whatever is relevant to you, the writing, or your client. Oh, and do remember to make sure that you set the right version of English when you're using tools like ProWritingAid, Grammarly, or whatever it is. So I've set this to general English, but of course there are differences between British English and US English. In other words, realize is spelt R-E-A-L-I-Z-E in the United States and R-E-A-L-I-S-E in the United Kingdom. And and that is something the proofreader should watch out for. What type of spelling are they relying on? What types of spellings should they fix? Better to be consistent than inconsistent in anything that you're proofreading. Antidote is a popular grammar checker and proofreader which not as many people use as Grammarly and perhaps ProWritingAid. When I first heard about it, I was surprised to find that Antidote has actually been around for over 25 years. It supports English and French. Currently, there are three different versions of Antidote. There's Antidote Web, which I'm gonna show you in a moment. There's Antidote Mobile, which works on your mobile app, like the other tools that I've shown you. And there's also Antidote 11, which you can install locally on your computer. It works pretty similar to these versions here. The only difference is that you don't need cloud or internet access. So you'll install a relatively large software program that will basically use its database to scan for grammar errors and other issues in documents that you're proofreading, rather than going to the cloud to identify potential issues. It does take a little bit of time to set up, that's probably the only downside, and you will need to integrate it with the various apps that you have. That works pretty similar to the web version. So I've pasted in the same article into Antidote and you can see here that it will identify potential language errors in my article. So I can click them here to change them and I can decide whether I want to correct them, add them to my custom dictionary or ignore. It would also identify American versus British spelling errors. So this is helpful depending on what language you're using. And you can, of course, change your preferences as well in the settings section. It would also identify unknown words that you may want to define or add disclaimers for. It supports custom dictionaries, which is something that I think all good proofreading software needs. So this is basically where you can add words to your custom dictionary, or you can look up existing words for finding words that are less overused or that are less commonly applied so your writer is not overriding on cliches. It also has a number of guides that proofreaders can use too, which are quite helpful. The guides cover everything from spelling rules to lexicon to grammar to syntax and so on. So it's quite helpful to have something like this as a proofreader because sometimes you'll change something, you might get pushback from a client, you might want a bit of context, and this is where a good proofreading software can help. Grammarly and ProWritingAid will present this information in the app itself as a dropdown. But if you actually need to look up some more detailed information, you could potentially use Antidote to get more information about spellings, homophones, verb conjugation, and so on. And again, this is quite helpful because there are lots of different examples. And you can, of course, look this up and you get all this inside of Antidote. Now on the customization section, you can actually add your custom words as well to your dictionary. So if I click on Create Dictionary, this is something you can perhaps do for a client, And then you could start putting in custom words. So I could say hodl is a noun and then click save. And then I wouldn't have to worry about this word being flagged in Antidote any further. So my key takeaway from using Antidote is that it's really powerful and it's fantastic to have an option that doesn't rely on internet access. This particular version that I tried on screen does come as part of a monthly subscription. So last time I checked, Antidote will cost you 59 Euro for the year, or 99 euro for a family version, or 119 euro if you want the version for Windows and Mac that doesn't require internet access. At the time of recording this video, those prices translate straight to US dollars, so $59, $99, and $119. But of course, prices do vary depending on which version you take out. I would actually recommend going with this version because you get everything. The only real downside to Antidote, much like the other tools I've talked about, is that it doesn't have a citation manager, which is something they're gonna show you in a moment and how it could save you time as a proofreader. QuillBot is a grammar checker and proofreading software that I've reviewed extensively on this channel. It's quite good. So it costs $19.95 per month, so it's $10 cheaper than Grammarly. You can save money, much like the other tools, by taking out a semi-annual or annual subscription. Now, it has a couple of different options, like a paraphraser, a grammar checker, plagiarism checker, summarizer, and citation generator. I go into detail about what all of these tools are in my QuillBot review. Suffice to say, or to summarize, the grammar checker works like grammar checkers in other proofreading tools that I've shown you. You can upload a document or scan it for errors, and you can also run a plagiarism check, and it will scan a document against content published elsewhere online. But it's actually the citation generator that I think proofreaders will find particularly useful. So let me explain why. A couple of years ago, I was working as, or I was completing a master's thesis, and I was worried that a typo and grammar mistake was going to derail me from getting a good mark in the thesis, because this happened to a friend a few years ago. Also, our lecturer hammered home the importance of correctly citing your works. And she said that some external graders will actually mark down the thesis if something is cited incorrectly or doesn't follow the correct format. So I spent many stressful hours checking all of the various citation styles inside of my thesis were correct. And that actually meant checking that full stops and commas were in the right place. It was actually a little bit of a waste of time in that I should have really been writing a better thesis rather than worrying about full stops. That said, it is something that I needed to do. But a citation generator could have saved me a lot of time and I wish I'd known about one back then. So for example, I'm going to go to an article on an Irish newspaper, the Irish Times. I'm gonna paste in the URL from the article. Now paste this in here. And I'm gonna click cite. And Quillbot will just take a moment to run the article or to run the article through a citation generator. Now I'm just gonna fill in the missing information. So this article is actually by a journalist called Dennis Staunton. So I'm gonna put in Dennis's name here. If there were co-writers, I could add these. The date that it was published was the 6th of September, which is the time I'm recording this video. And the date it was accessed, which is something that you do for any good citation, is also today. Now I'm gonna click Save Citation. QuillBot will save it to my citation library. Now I can simply copy this citation over to any writing app. So for the purpose of this video, I just have still have Antidote open. I paste this in and you can see I have the correctly formatted citation. What a fantastic way to get citations right in your nonfiction books and articles. Not only that, but I can go from MLA to Chicago Manual of Style to APA, which is another particular, particularly popular citation style. I can paste this in. Again, correctly formatted. This type of thing would have saved me hours on my thesis and I probably would have gotten or written it quicker. So I would actually use Quillbot in conjunction with one of the other grammar checkers simply for this citation generator. Now, if you're interested, or perhaps you're just on a really tight budget, you can, of course, just paste in any article. So I'm gonna go back and copy this article in here so you can quickly see how it works. Now, because I've copied it from Antidote, it hasn't brought over all of the spacing, but just for the purposes of this video, I just wanna show you how it will find some grammar errors. I'm gonna click fix all errors. It will automatically fix all errors in my work, but I would never recommend you do that as a proofreader because you can't take anything that these tools say as gospel. That's just the way that people like to save time. So what I actually recommend you do is make sure everything is correctly formatted. Then you're going to review the changes that Quillbot has highlighted in blue and red. So much like a traditional spell checker and decide what you want to remove or keep. And basically, you need to make the best decision based on the intention of the article in question, what makes sense for your work. So let's put in a typo here so you can see one. I've been following and investing. I'm gonna put in a spelling error and see if Quillbot catches it. And it's highlighted it in red, and now we can simply change that to investing. And then the ones in blue, it suggested that I make this fluent, so I need to put a colon after seven. And the reason why there's a hashtag here is this is actually marked them. Anyway, it's correctly changed this for me too. So in summary, you can upload your articles, but do go through them, or do go through the suggestions one by one, rather than looking to accept all changes for that very reason. Correct English is another proofreading tool. It's specifically aimed at those in education and those in academia. Again, I took out a trial of Correct English for the purposes of this video. So I spent $24, and basically I get the basic grammar checker, punctuation checker, word suggestions and so on that you've seen in all of the other tools. Now, Correct English does not have the plugins and apps and software that you can use to check or proofread emails and Word documents and basically anything that you write in an online form. In other words, you need to log into the Correct English website to do all of this, but it is quite good. And I particularly like how it handles style guides. So I'm going to log in. Once you've opened up your Correct English account, you can add your documents for proofreading in several different ways. So you can import a Word document from your computer or that a client has sent you over email. Or if they shared a Google document with you, you can connect it to your Google Docs account. Or you can simply just paste in an article and that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna paste in a version of the article that I was using a moment ago with some inserted grammar mistakes. Now it'll save it. And the next step is not to just assume that it's going to check it in real time. I actually need to click check my doc. It will take a moment to scan it for grammar errors. And then on the right-hand sidebar, you can see here that it will underline potential grammar mistakes in green, and will also underline potential style issues in yellow. So here is a potential error, bots.s, which I put into the article beforehand, and you can see here that it's saying the word bots.s is not in the dictionary. So it hasn't actually flagged that it should be just bots with no s, but it has flagged it as a spelling concern, so I would just press backspace to delete this. For organized, it has said that the preferred spelling I've organized is with a Z. And I thought that was interesting because I've actually thought I'd set this to United Kingdom English, but it has flagged it as a concern rather than something I should fix. So I'm just gonna ignore this one. Here's another one here. This is a contraction that could be a question of style. So if it's for academia, I may not want to use a contraction where if it's for a blog post, contractions are fine. And it's suggesting that I use cannot. So you can see here, I would just work through my documents one by one going through each of these issues. You can also apply formatting based on a style guide. So for example, I'm going to select this subheading here and I'm going to pick APA and then it will automatically format it as an APA styled heading. So I'm gonna click APA title. And then if I pick this here, I'm gonna format this as an APA text. And basically I can use this to format a research paper before getting ready to submit it. Of course, you may want to run this through with a client. So there is a sharing option whereby you can save the document and you give it a name. So I'm just going to call it A and then you can share it with somebody so that they can log in and see your changes and decide whether they want to accept or reject them. They can also leave comments as well for you. I like correct English because of the fact that you can correctly or quickly format an essay based on your preferred style and because it has a citation manager. However, I found it a little bit slower to find some grammar mistakes and other issues compared to Grammarly and some other tools in this video. And as you may have seen, the interface probably lags a little bit in that you manually have to click save and manually click check my doc rather than expecting to do it in real time. Those are seven of my top proofreading tools that are available right now. Goes to say that there are many more that you will come across. In fact, I have an in-depth article where I profile some of the other alternatives. I'll put a link to that in the notes below this video. In short, use Grammarly for all types of proofreading. If you want an alternative, try Antidote or ProWritingAid. And if you need something that handles citations, consider Quillbot. Always remember that as a proofreader, it's your job to figure out the intention of the piece, to work with your client, and also to figure out who the ideal reader is. These are simply tools or recommendations, and you don't have to take everything they say as gospel. Now that's it. I hope you enjoyed the content in this video. If you do, hit thumbs up. If you wanna get more videos like this, don't forget to subscribe to the channel.