Almost every other person on the internet will have posted an article online, either in their personal blogs or professional websites, even in Facebook and Tumblr! Some of you will often face the fact that the writing isn’t the best, often ending up using long and wordy sentences to describe somethings. I face this a lot of times and if we could somehow proofread our writings on our own. Current word processors like Microsoft Office Word, Apple iWork, etc are good, but not the ideal requirement. There are great tools, like Grammarly, that does the job but expensive. Slick Write fits the bill with neat tools for proofreading and statistics and it is totally free!

SlickWrite is a web tool to proof read any text. It automatically checks for any grammar errors, excessive usage of adverb or passive voice and more. It also provides statistical analysis of the text on various factors such as number of adverbs, words in passive voice, even number of simple, compound and long sentences. Though it is nowhere near to a sound proofreading by an expert, the statistical analysis it provides is handy.

Open up SlickWrite on a web browser and click on edit to paste any text you want to proofread. After you input any text, it can be 28,000 words long, click on “Proofread” to start the process. SlickWrite will process the text and leads you to the critique pane where it present you the same text with few words being highlighted in different colours. Hover over these highlighted words to see bubbles of information regarding the word(s) usage appear next to it. SlickWrite checks for cases where an adverb or passive voice might be used unnecessarily, a redundant phrase or wordy, misplaced conjunction and more. Click on any of these highlighted text to know see a description in the pane on the right. 

Other than Critique pane, you can also check the “Structure” pane, which has similar highlighting on sentences, categorized into simple, complex or compound and long sentences. The “Flow” pane shows the graph of these sentences that appear in the text.

The “Stats” section lets you view all the statistics of the structure of the text you have input. Other than the number of words, characters, sentences, it also shows number of adverbs, pronouns, uncommon words, percentage of passive voice usage, number of types of sentences and more.

You can edit the text anytime by going to the edit page. Make sure you click on “Proofread” to start the process.

Moreover SlickWrite lets you configure the proofreading options in the configure tab. Apart from the normal check on grammar and words, SlickWrite can also check forlanguage, biases, confusing/ambiguous words and various such options. Again you have to click on proofread button for this to take effect.

SlickWrite is a great online tool for proofreading. It does not replace human proofreading, but it does half the job with various customizable options. Apart from the web, SlickWrite also has extensions for Chrome, Firefox, OpenOffice, even a WordPress Plugin. The interface is easy and has useful functions.