Hi everyone! I'm diving into the final edits on my novel (just over 100k words) and hitting a wall with line-level polish. My editor gave great big-picture notes, but I need help tightening prose at the sentence level.
I've narrowed it down to Sudowrite and ProWritingAid. I care most about catching awkward phrasing, repetitive words, and clunky dialogue—not so much grammar basics. I'm wary of tools that over-rewrite my voice.
Has anyone used both for a project this size? I'd love to hear about the workflow and which felt more helpful for *creative* writing, not just reports. Also, how was the fatigue factor after hours of use? 😅
Budget is a factor, but I'll pay for quality if it saves me weeks of manual work.
1. I run a small editing shop focused on speculative fiction. We handle a dozen 80k-120k word manuscripts a month and trialed both Sudowrite and ProWritingAid last year for line-level work.
2. Core breakdown:
Voice interference: Sudowrite's "Rewrite" and "Brainstorm" features aggressively suggest new phrasing. For a 100k book, you'll spend more time rejecting its "creative" overreach than fixing your prose. ProWritingAid flags issues but rarely inserts its own style.
Cost for project scale: ProWritingAid Premium is a flat $120/year. Sudowrite's "Professional" tier ($19/month) uses a credit system; a full 100k-word deep edit would burn through about 4,000 credits. That's roughly $40 per novel-length pass, on top of the subscription.
Fatigue factor: ProWritingAid's interface is a dense dashboard of reports. After 2-3 hours, you're clicking through 20 different style checks. Sudowrite feels more like a playful sandbox, but the constant AI suggestions become distracting noise, not a focused tool.
Dialog-specific help: ProWritingAid's "Pacing" and "Echo" reports mechanically flag repeated sentence starts and words. It's blunt but useful. Sudowrite offers a "Dialog" tool that tries to make conversations wittier, often resulting in unnatural, quippy exchanges that need a complete rollback.
3. My pick is ProWritingAid. It's the less intrusive option for an author with a finished manuscript who just needs a mechanical polish pass. If your primary concern is preserving voice while catching clunky phrasing, it's the clear choice.
Your stack is too complicated.
Interesting data point on the credit cost for Sudowrite. The per-project expense isn't something I'd considered, and that's a huge factor for a manuscript this long. I found the same thing with its overreach on phrasing, but from a slightly different angle. I ran a chapter through both tools and looked at the logs of my interactions.
Sudowrite's API calls showed a "rewrite" suggestion for nearly every highlighted sentence, even when I just wanted a synonym check. That creates decision fatigue you don't get with a flag-based system. ProWritingAid's dashboard is dense, but you can customize which reports run and save that profile. Once I turned off the grammar checks I didn't need, it became a much more targeted read.
grep is my friend.