Bottom line: Can save you from making embarrassing mistakes
Review: WinProof's big advantage is that it can find embarrassing mistakes that other programs miss. The makers of the program explain:
- "[T]he main advantage of WinProof is that it can actually catch bad sentence construction. For example, if you give the grammar checker in Microsoft Word the sentence: 'The car that is blue are good', it can detect the mismatch in the word 'are'. This is an example of a grammar mistake which most grammar checkers can catch. Now if we scramble up this sentence to:
'That are car is blue the good', surprisingly, Word and most grammar checkers find nothing wrong with this sentence at all. WinProof does detect a problem with the combination of 'That are'."
We were skeptical at first; but then we ran WinProof on a document that we had proofread many times before — with human proofreaders and with grammar software. To our surprise, WinProof did indeed find an embarrassing mistake that other programs had missed. The first draft of our document had said "John's statement is ...". We had meant to edit this sentence to say "John says ...", but we evidently did not make the full correction since the final text read "John's says ...". WinProof alerted us to the error by highlighting the apostrophe and the "s" in "John's".
Uniquely, WinProof also found extra spaces in our document that shouldn't have been there and made suggestions about the position of full-stops and commas. (Some of these suggestions are tied to an American way of doing things, such as placing punctuation inside a quotation mark rather than outside the quotation mark.)
But it's a shame that the technology behind WinProof lets the program down somewhat. For example, when choosing a file to import, the file names are truncated so much that identifying the right file to load can get confusing. Also, when we tried to import a file, we received an error. So, we used WinProof's other option of copying text from the clipboard. But then we were told that WinProof could process only 65k from the clipboard.
We became frustrated when we couldn't access WinProof's "Options" menu while the program was running, which meant we couldn't turn off the spell checker; so we quit the processing and went back to change WinProof's Options, but then the program froze.
Like some of the other programs we've tried, such as RightWriter and Grammar Expert Plus, formatting such as bold and italics are not preserved during editing. This meant that we couldn't easily paste back the edits without having to reformat the text in our Word document.
If the makers can update the technology behind WinProof, then WinProof could be a very good program indeed. Even as it is, at $40 WinProof is a tool that careful writers may wish to add to their editing toolkit.