Most Canadian university writing centres recommend that students treat automated grammar and style checkers as one pass in a broader revision process, not a final filter. That framing is accurate, but it sidesteps a practical reality: students at every level use these tools routinely, and the choice of tool affects what kind of feedback they receive. Three editors — Grammarly, ProWritingAid, and Hemingway — each approach the problem differently and suit different writing contexts.

Grammarly

Grammarly is the most widely recognized of the three. It operates as a browser extension, a standalone desktop app, and an integration within Microsoft Word and Google Docs. The free tier covers basic grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Premium adds style suggestions, clarity rewrites, and tone detection.

What it catches well

Grammarly is strong on conventional grammar errors: subject-verb agreement, comma splices, run-on sentences, and passive voice flags. It also highlights wordiness — a common issue in student essays that pad arguments with filler phrases. For students writing in English as a second language, the consistency of its grammar checks is particularly useful because it covers a broad set of constructions systematically.

Academic context notes

Grammarly's tone and clarity suggestions are calibrated for general professional writing rather than discipline-specific academic style. A humanities essay and a chemistry lab report have different conventions around sentence length, hedging language, and structure, but Grammarly applies the same preference for shorter, simpler sentences to both. This means its style suggestions should be evaluated critically rather than accepted wholesale. Grammarly's plagiarism checker (Premium) compares text against web content and academic databases; it is not a substitute for institutional plagiarism detection systems such as Turnitin, which universities use at the submission level.

Access at Canadian institutions

Grammarly for Education offers institutional licensing that several Canadian post-secondary institutions have adopted, providing Premium access to enrolled students at no individual cost. Carleton University and Ryerson (Toronto Metropolitan University) have offered this through student services in recent years. Check your institution's writing centre or student services portal.

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid occupies a different niche: it generates detailed reports on specific writing patterns across an entire document, rather than inline suggestions on individual sentences. It integrates with Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, and the web editor.

Report-based analysis

Each report in ProWritingAid targets a specific dimension of writing. The Overused Words report identifies words you rely on heavily throughout a document. The Sentence Length report visualizes variation across paragraphs. The Sticky Sentences report flags constructions with a high density of "glue words" — prepositions, conjunctions, and other structure words — that can make academic prose feel congested.

For longer documents — a research paper, a thesis chapter, a literature review — this pattern-level analysis is more informative than Grammarly's sentence-by-sentence suggestions. It shows structural habits across a full piece rather than isolated issues.

Pricing structure

ProWritingAid offers a free web editor with a 500-word limit per check, and a premium subscription at US$20/month or US$79/year. Unlike Grammarly, it does not have widely available institutional licenses in Canada, meaning most students pay individually. A lifetime purchase option (US$399) exists but is rarely practical for students with a defined academic timeline.

Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor takes the most focused approach of the three. It highlights sentences by colour: yellow for complex, red for very hard to read, and also flags passive voice, adverbs, and phrases with simpler alternatives. The interface has no grammar checker — it is exclusively a readability and style tool.

Readability-first approach

The editor assigns a readability grade level to the document. This is useful for checking whether writing has become unnecessarily dense. Long, heavily subordinated sentences are common in student academic writing, and Hemingway provides a fast visual scan of where those sentences cluster. The free browser version (hemingwayapp.com) requires no account; the desktop app with offline use and direct export to Word or Markdown costs US$19.99 as a one-time purchase.

When it applies to academic writing

Hemingway works well for abstracts, introductions, and discussion sections where clarity for a broad reader matters. For dense theoretical or methodological sections, the readability flag for "hard to read" sentences should be treated as a prompt to review, not a correction to follow. Some academic writing legitimately requires complex sentence structures to represent nuanced argument.

Research databases accessible through Canadian university libraries

Beyond editing tools, most Canadian university library systems provide access to research databases that can accelerate the research phase:

  • EBSCOhost — aggregates multiple databases including Academic Search Complete, available at most Canadian universities. Covers social sciences, humanities, and sciences broadly.
  • ProQuest — strong coverage of dissertations (through ProQuest Dissertations & Theses) and newspaper archives. Useful for finding Canadian theses.
  • JSTOR — deep archives of academic journals across disciplines, with a focus on humanities and social sciences. Most Canadian university libraries provide full JSTOR access.
  • Google Scholar — free, broad academic search. Less curated than library databases but useful for finding papers and then checking whether your institution has full-text access through the library link resolver.
  • Érudit — Canadian research consortium covering francophone academic publishing. Essential for research on Canadian topics in French or requiring French-language sources.

Choosing a combination

The three tools are not mutually exclusive. A practical sequence for a university essay might look like this: draft in whatever environment suits you, run a Hemingway pass on the introduction and conclusion for readability, use Grammarly inline to catch grammatical errors during final editing, and optionally run a ProWritingAid report on the full document if working on something longer than 2,000 words. None of these replaces peer review or feedback from course instructors.

Canadian university writing centres — including those at UBC, U of T, and Concordia — offer one-on-one consultations and structured writing workshops throughout the academic year. These remain the highest-value resource for improving academic writing over time.

Last updated: April 10, 2025. Pricing and institutional access details reflect publicly available information at time of publication and are subject to change.