The #Writers Craft: One Big Step for #ProWritingAid: One Giant Leap for Writerkind

Posted On July 9, 2019

(Beth Turnage Blog) Christmas arrived in July when Chris Banks of Pro-Writing Aid made this announcement in their monthly email:

Beta Testers Needed for our New Google Docs Add-On

We are thrilled to introduce our shiny new Google Docs add-on! Now you will have access to the full ProWritingAid editor right within GoogleDocs.

It’s brand new, however, which means it might still have some wrinkles. We’d love for some of our users to try it out and report back about any problems they run into.

It’s easy to get the add-on set up on your computer. You just need to make sure that your ProWriting Aid license is associated with a Google email address (google.com, gmail, etc.)

And like a kid at Christmas, I had to unpack this right away.

Because I make my life needlessly complicated I found that having multiple synced Gmail accounts prevented the successful installation of the new Beta product since I have PWA for Chrome installed on my master account. This is not the same account that I use for Pro-Writing Aid. After some non-ladylike swearing I unsynced the accounts and install PWA for Google Docs easily in my bethturnagewriter@gmail.com account. This is what the screen looks like.

Unlike Cloud PWA or PWA for Google Chrome there are only two lines—Report and Improve Document. The report looks like the PWA Cloud version:

And the “Improve Document” line brings you to the same screen as when you use PWA cloud version:

The only difference is the “Apply Changes and Close” block on the bottom which is inconvenient. And I recommend that you apply changes after each section of work or you might forget like I did and lose your wordsmithery. That means you have to go again to proceed to the next section, but heh, if you want to tempt the Fates, go right ahead.

But otherwise, it is no different from PWA making this a huge improvement for those of us that use Google Docs to create our work.

Thanks, Chris Banks and Pro-Writing Aid!

Note: ProWriting Aid logo used the fair use provisions of US copyright law allowing image use in commentaries.