ProWritingAid for Students: Is It Better Than Grammarly for Essays?

The Honest Question First: Will This Get You Flagged?

Let’s answer the AI concern directly because it’s the first question most students have.

ProWritingAid does not write your essays. It analyzes your writing and suggests improvements — grammar fixes, style suggestions, readability scores. You still write every word. An AI detector cannot flag a tool that doesn’t generate text.

This is different from AI writing tools like ChatGPT or Jasper, which generate content. ProWritingAid is a writing improvement tool, not a writing generation tool. Using it is academically equivalent to using spell check or having a friend proofread your paper.

With that settled — is ProWritingAid actually worth it for students?

Disclosure: We may earn a commission if you purchase ProWritingAid through our links. How we review →

What ProWritingAid Does for Student Essays

ProWritingAid’s core feature is its suite of 25+ writing analysis reports. For students, these are the most relevant:

Grammar and Style Report

The starting point. Catches grammatical errors, punctuation problems, and basic style issues. This is what most students think all editing tools do — but ProWritingAid goes much deeper.

Readability Report

Analyzes how easy your writing is to read, including:

• Sentence length variation — are all your sentences the same length? (They shouldn’t be)
• Flesch Reading Ease score — is your writing appropriate for your audience?
• Paragraph length — are you writing walls of text?

For academic writing, readability matters. Professors who grade 30+ papers are subconsciously more favorable to papers that read smoothly.

Passive Voice Report

Academic writing often overuses passive voice (“It was determined that…” vs. “The research determined that…”). ProWritingAid flags every passive voice instance and suggests active alternatives. Most style guides (including APA) recommend limiting passive voice — ProWritingAid helps you find it.

Overused Words Report

Shows where you’re relying on the same words repeatedly. “Very,” “really,” “basically,” “thing,” “aspect,” “factor” — these are the academic writer’s crutches. This report finds them all.

Consistency Report

This one is particularly valuable for dissertations and longer papers:

• Are you writing “healthcare” and “health care” interchangeably?
• Are you capitalizing “Government” sometimes and leaving it lowercase other times?
• Are you using both “Oxford comma” and no Oxford comma?

These inconsistencies are harder to catch manually in a 10,000-word paper. ProWritingAid catches them all.

Clichés and Redundancies Report

Academic writing is full of redundant phrases: “due to the fact that” (use “because”), “in order to” (use “to”), “the reason why is because” (just use “because”). ProWritingAid flags them with cleaner alternatives.

→ Try ProWritingAid free for your next essay

ProWritingAid vs. Grammarly for Students

This is the comparison most students want. Here’s the honest breakdown:

Grammar Checking

Both tools catch most grammatical errors. Grammarly is slightly better at catching obscure grammar rules (certain comma uses, agreement errors). ProWritingAid is competitive but Grammarly edges it here.

Edge: Grammarly (slight)

Style and Depth of Analysis

This is where ProWritingAid pulls ahead significantly. Grammarly gives you style suggestions one at a time. ProWritingAid gives you a full report on every style dimension — passive voice percentage, sentence length variation, readability score, overused words count — all at once.

For students who want to understand patterns in their writing (not just individual corrections), ProWritingAid’s report format is far superior.

Edge: ProWritingAid

Academic Writing Specifically

Grammarly added academic writing mode, but ProWritingAid’s citation checking, academic register analysis, and consistency reports were built with academic writing in mind. ProWritingAid also works inside Word’s desktop app natively — important for students who write dissertations in Word rather than Google Docs.

Edge: ProWritingAid

Ease of Use

Grammarly wins on simplicity. The interface is clean, suggestions appear inline as you type, and it requires no learning curve. ProWritingAid’s report-based interface takes 30-60 minutes to get comfortable with.

Edge: Grammarly

Price

ProWritingAid is slightly cheaper annually and occasionally runs promotions that bring the price down further. Neither tool has a true ongoing student discount — the “discount” is simply the annual billing rate.

Edge: ProWritingAid (slightly)

The Verdict

For students who want a tool that makes them better writers (not just catches mistakes), ProWritingAid wins. The depth of analysis creates feedback loops that actually change how you write. Grammarly is better if you want the simplest possible experience.

ProWritingAid Pricing for Students

The recommendation: If you’re a student who writes essays regularly, the annual plan at ~$10/month is the right choice. $120/year for a tool that improves every paper you submit is a reasonable academic investment.

Watch for sales. ProWritingAid runs promotions throughout the year, particularly in November (NaNoWriMo season) and sometimes at the start of the academic year. Check prowritingaid.com/pricing before buying.

→ Start your ProWritingAid free trial

How to Use ProWritingAid for Academic Writing

Here’s the workflow for essay editing:

Step 1: Write Your Draft First

Don’t use ProWritingAid while you’re drafting. Write your full first draft without any tools. Editing as you write disrupts the creative flow.

Step 2: Run the Grammar and Style Report

Open ProWritingAid (in Google Docs or the web editor), paste your essay, and run the Grammar and Style report. Fix the clear errors first.

Step 3: Run Readability

Check your readability score. If it’s flagging long sentences, break them up. Check your passive voice percentage — many professors prefer active voice. Aim for under 20% passive.

Step 4: Check Consistency (Especially for Long Papers)

For essays over 2,000 words, run the Consistency report. It catches the capitalization and terminology inconsistencies you’d never notice manually.

Step 5: Review Overused Words

Look at what you’re overusing. If “significant” appears 15 times in a 2,500-word essay, replace half of them with synonyms.

Step 6: Final Proofread

After running the reports and making changes, do one final read-through. ProWritingAid catches a lot, but reading your own work aloud catches the remaining awkward phrasing that tools miss.

For Dissertation Students

ProWritingAid is particularly valuable for dissertation writers. Long-form academic documents have specific problems that short-essay editing tools miss:

Why dissertations benefit more from ProWritingAid:

• Consistency across 20,000+ words — you will accidentally write “healthcare” and “health care” interchangeably. ProWritingAid catches every instance.
• Passive voice accumulation — academic writers default to passive voice. In a dissertation, that pattern becomes overwhelming. ProWritingAid shows you the full scope of the problem.
• Structural analysis — where are your paragraphs too long? Where is your writing most dense? The visualizations make this clear.
• Term consistency — you define a term in Chapter 1 and then vary its capitalization across Chapters 3 and 5. Consistency Report finds this.

For PhD students: the annual plan price is trivial compared to the cost of a dissertation editing service. Many editors use ProWritingAid themselves.

Pros and Cons for Students

✅ Pros

• Deeper than Grammarly for academic writing style analysis
• ~$10/month annually — cheaper than Grammarly Premium
• Google Docs integration — works where you write
• Consistency Report — essential for long papers and dissertations
• Doesn’t generate AI text — safe to use without AI detection concerns

❌ Cons

• Free plan limited to 500 words — frustrating for essay editing
• Steeper learning curve than Grammarly
• No AI detection — separate tool needed if that’s a concern
• Best features require Premium — free tier is genuinely limited
• Interface not as polished as Grammarly’s

Verdict

For students who take their writing seriously — and especially for those writing essays, research papers, or dissertations where quality of expression matters — ProWritingAid is the better investment compared to Grammarly Premium.

The price advantage (~$10/month vs ~$12/month annually) is small, but the depth of analysis is meaningfully better. The reports teach you patterns in your writing rather than just correcting individual errors. Students who use ProWritingAid consistently tend to need it less over time — because they’ve actually learned from the feedback.

That’s the difference between a tool that fixes your writing and one that improves your writing.

→ Start your ProWritingAid free trial — improve your next essay today

Related Reading

• Full ProWritingAid Review 2026
• ProWritingAid for Academic Writing
• ProWritingAid vs Grammarly vs Hemingway 2026