The 5 Best Writing Assistants (2023) – Write Better, Faster, and More Productively

For most of us, writing well can be a challenge. The challenge is multiplied for those struggling to overcome grammar mistakes, typos, and a lack of clarity. If you’re like me, you don’t remember much from those writing courses you took in school, what a split infinitive is, or even when to use well versus good correctly. Fortunately, Internet-based writing assistants can help you overcome these challenges, and they do an excellent job in the process.

This post will share the five best writing assistants for improving your writing. Whether you’re looking for a spellcheck tool or a tool to help you write faster and more productively, we have the perfect tool for you.

What Is a Writing Assistant Tool?

In one sentence, a writing assistant tool helps correct spelling, grammar, tone, cadence, and more. They can take many forms, such as a grammar checker, a thesaurus, or even a human editor. With modern software, all the different aspects of writing well are bundled into a single app or service that runs independently or as a browser extension. These services continually observe how you write and what you’re trying to infer with your words and offer suggestions for taking your writing to the next level.

These tools can serve as a simple spelling and grammar checker (channeling the days of yore within Microsoft Word), or they can dig deep enough to offer up entirely different sentence structures to sound more assertive in your technical documentation, casual in your emails, persuasive to your clients, or formal in your doctoral dissertation.

Let’s look at five of the best writing assistants we could find and how they’ll benefit you and your writing.

The Seller Journal’s Picks for Best Writing Assistant Tool

We don’t think this is an exhaustive list but rather an aggregation of our favorites. These are the tools folks are using most because they rock and cover a variety of implementations and use cases.

1. Grammarly

Grammarly is the pièce de résistance of writing assistant tools. It’s a full-featured application with standalone download options on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android, a custom keyboard for iOS and Android, and a browser extension for Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. For more traditional document writers, Grammarly also comes in extension form for Microsoft Word and Google Docs.

The Free plan offers basics like spelling, grammar, punctuation support, conciseness, and essential tone detection. The Premium plan adds more advanced clarity and tone recommendations, plagiarism, word choice, formality, fluency, and more nuanced suggestions like consistency in punctuation (ex: using single quotes versus double quotes consistently). On the Premium plan, Grammarly will rewrite sentences where necessary if it feels the best method to enhance a particular passage.

For business accounts, Grammarly adds a style guide (ensuring certain words, phrases, or acronyms are never used, used a specific way, or spelled correctly), pre-created snippets, more nuanced tones for your brand, and other corporate features like a dashboard to see how users are utilizing the company’s Grammarly subscription.

The Premium plan is the best value and gives you access to the tools that let Grammarly shine. The Premium plan is $30/month but is marked down to $12.99/month when paid yearly.

2. Linguix

If you’ve ever used Grammarly, you’ll find Linguix familiar. One of the biggest competitors to Grammarly, Linguix, aims to offer intelligent, detailed writing suggestions at a hyper-competitive price while still being easy to use. It provides standalone apps for Mac and Windows; browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge; and extensions for Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook.

If you’re a Safari user, Linguix also offers a neat Shortcuts extension that allows you to type trigger phrases like //thankyou, which Linguix automatically replaces with an entire snippet of your text choosing. Writing canned responses or signing off emails becomes more efficient. Linguix claims automating repetitive responses can save businesses upwards of $10,000 per year on time one spends on tasks.

Linguix, like Grammarly, offers three plans: Free, Premium, and Team. The Free plan comes with spelling and grammar checking, a finite number of AI-based rewriting of sentences per day, Shortcuts, and a dictionary lookup tool. The Premium plan adds to it with more complex suggestions and unlimited rewrites per day. As with Grammarly, teams have access to style guides and performance dashboards.

While the Free plan is helpful, the Premium plan is a fantastic deal at just $8/month paid yearly ($96/year), or $14.99/month. That’s about half the price of a Grammarly subscription offering similar features.

3. ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid offers 20 different methods to check your writing to ensure you’re conveying your message precisely and concisely. Writing style, grammar, overused words, spelling, filler words (ex: and, but, of, to, the), readability (using the Flesch Reading Ease scale), repetition, and leading pronouns are just the first half of the checks on the list.

Like the other tools on this list, ProWritingAid offers standalone apps on Mac and Windows (early access); browser extensions for Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge; integrations with Microsoft Word and Google Docs. One of the most excellent features is their richer, Premium-only app that can open files from Microsoft Word, Scrivener projects (hello screenplay and novel writers!), Open Office, and others. Within the desktop app, you can check your work using the same robust checks ProWritingAid provides and keep your original document formatting.

The free plan of ProWritingAid allows you to check up to 500 words at a time, only works online on the ProWritingAid Web site, and checks your work against 19 different reports. The Premium plan ($79/year) brings forward all the features of the free version, removes the word limit,  and adds support for the Desktop app and the browser and Microsoft Word and Google Docs extensions. For academics, bump up to Premium+ ($89/year) and gain access to plagiarism checking, a must-have for writing academic papers.

4. WordRake

If you’re a professional writer–think legal briefs, technical documentation, handbooks, manuals, etc., WordRake is the de facto tool to help improve and fine-tune your professional writing style. WordRake exists only as an integration for Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook on Mac and Windows, which makes sense, given their target market.

WordRake integrates seamlessly into Word and Outlook and will quickly become part of your writing and editing workflow. WordRake starts at $129/year or $259/three years on Microsoft Word or $199/year or $399/three years for Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook.

5. Ginger

Ginger is an English writing assistant great for spell checking, grammar checking, and improving sentence quality, consistency, and tone. Ginger’s sentence rephrasing is AI-based, offering an incredibly flexible set of recommendations for improving your writing. In addition, Ginger’s AI logic can offer up synonyms for common words to ensure the repetition of words still has a flavor of uniqueness.

Ginger runs as a standalone app for Windows and Mac, mobile apps for iOS and Android, a custom keyboard for Android, and browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, and Edge.

Ginger runs excellent on the free tier, but the premium plans are where it shines. Ginger Premium can correct multiple mistakes in tandem and has no limit on the amount of AI-based rephrasing at your disposal. Ginger Premium has an add-in for Microsoft Word and Outlook to make your papers and emails shine and opens access to translation into more than 40 languages. Ginger Premium starts at $7.49/month when paid yearly or $13.99/month.

How to Use Writing Assistant Tools

You’ll have access to most writing assistant tools through your browser. Some services also offer standalone apps to download.

If you’re using it as a standalone tool, you’ll need to open the application and copy and paste your text into the box. These tools have formatting functionality, so you’ll still have formatted headers, bulleted lists, emphasized text, and more. The writing assistant will then analyze your text and provide feedback on grammar, style, and structure.

This format of writing assistant tooling often comes in the form of an icon in the corner of a text box. This indicator reminds you that it’s running and evaluating your writing. Using it as an extension will run in the background while writing and provide real-time grammar, style, and structure feedback. Having a writing companion is a great option if you want to ensure that your prose is error-free as you go; this is my preferred method wherever possible because it keeps me in the proper context for writing and trying to carry over formatting from one tool to the other doesn’t always work out as I hope.

Pros and Cons of Using Writing Assistant Tools

While writing assistant tools are billed as panaceas for bad writing or a means to write better, faster, and stronger than one could, they come with a few quirks. On the one hand, they can help you correctly use grammar without needing a college degree. They can also help you use a more robust tone of voice in your writing that you may not be familiar with and adjust your writing style to match any number of others while still sounding like yourself.

On the other hand, some of the best writing checks are often behind a paywall, and that wall can be expensive to climb over. Most of these tools are Internet-based, so an active Internet connection is required. Some, like WordRake, run locally within Microsoft Word.

Wrapping it Up

At The Seller Journal, we believe in the power of a good writing assistant. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the five best writing assistants to help you write better, faster, and more productively. From grammar checkers to spellcheck tools, these five writing assistants will help you take your writing to the next level.