What do you actually use to check your essays before submitting?

[HurtBreaker]

I've been using Grammarly for two years and I'm starting to feel like I've outgrown it? Like it catches the obvious stuff but my professors keep flagging issues that Grammarly never flags — mostly around argument clarity and paragraph cohesion rather than grammar

I'm a junior in communications and my essays are getting longer and more complex, and I feel like I need something that actually engages with structure rather than just surface-level correctness. A friend mentioned ProWritingAid as a step up from Grammarly and another suggested just reading my drafts out loud which sounds embarrassingly low-tech but apparently works.

The thing I actually want from an essay checker that I haven't found yet: something that tells me when a paragraph isn't doing what I think it's doing. Not spelling, not comma placement — actual logical flow feedback.

Does anything like that exist or am I describing a human reader? Also curious whether anyone uses the feedback tools built into Google Docs or Word at all or if those are basically useless for anything beyond basic corrections. Would love honest recommendations rather than whatever comes up first in a sponsored search

 

[ArnoldW]

ProWritingAid is legitimately better than Grammarly for the kind of stuff you're describing. The transition reports alone are worth it - it shows you exactly how you move between paragraphs and whether you're using the same words too often. I found out I overuse "however" and "therefore" in every single paper because the tool flagged it. Embarrassing but fixable! The free version is pretty generous too if you wanna test before buying anything.