Reviews & Comments of Writefull for Overleaf chrome extension

I have the premium version. Suggestions are ok (not chat-gpt level) and it is nice that it integrates with overleaf, however it is soo buggy. Most times it does not work with live editing and you need to reload the page each time you make a modifications. I keep having to relog in every couple of hours. In some occasions the system contradicts itself leading to a loop. It is in essence a useful tool and I dont expect them to be chat gpt, but they need to resolve these bugs.

This is one of the most important tools for Masters and PhD students in STEM. Must be made extremely popular and must be bought in bulk by universities around the world. The free version itself makes such a big difference. After using the free version I thought of using the premium version and I found out that my thesis report was unrecognizable from what I had written. One of the few apps in the world that I will support wholeheartedly. DOWNLOAD IT NOW!!!

I used this extension to review my master's thesis before submitting it. I must say that the recommendations I received were more often than not useful. It also made me realize common mistakes I was doing when writing my report. The only thing I can complain about is that it could not paraphrase well enough specific technical content but that can probably be fixed in the future. It is just a matter of time. Nevertheless, the proofreading is amazing and definitely would recommend it for the final stages of the writing process. Moreover, the customer service is incredible. I had one question and almost instantaneously the problem was fixed for me. Good job!

Seems to work better for academic writing than rival products. Support staff very helpful too. Some of the newer features look promising too but I haven't used them yet.

This is a great and useful tool. I've used the premium subscription in final passes on journal articles and my dissertation. I do find that on longer files, as edits are accepted or rejected it takes longer and longer to move to the next recommendation, which is annoying. I probably reject about 50% of the recommended changes but the other 50% are well worth it. It forces me to think about what I intended to write. If you're looking for something to help with reviewing this is a great tool. It won't solve all your problems but it will certainly help.

I've been using Writefull for some time now and the grammar checker substantially improved during this time. I tested Grammarly also, but I find Writefull more useful for academic writing. Development team is excellent - they are responsive and appreciate every feedback. I absolutely love their eagerness to improve the product :)

Good language tool. But for overleaf, it only checks several final paragraphs. The first half of my article is ignored.

An excellent application, very helpful in academics and also in daily life as a teacher

This software is incredibly helpful - for writing a final year dissertation project in a technical research discipline I found other systems not well suited but writeful functions very well when processing academic writing.

I enjoyed using Writefull as I was wrapping up my doctoral dissertation and only wish I had it earlier! I can highly recommend it, especially in combination with Overleaf! The app is great!

I used this extension along with the Premium subscription to write my PhD thesis. I wrote most of my thesis without this, but then went back and corrected hundreds of missed commas, weird wording, and poor formatting. Even though my thesis had tons of equations and figures this extension was able to parse the text and give recommendations. Even during the writing of my thesis (the last few months) there were improvements to the recommendations and more errors / changes were found more recently than my first revision. I would highly recommend this to anyone looking to save some time proofreading

It is a really great proofreading tool, especially when you're not a native English speaker and need to write paper in latex. Me personally use it when writing my master thesis, it works flawlessly with overleaf and delivers desirable result, no need to copy the text out and paste into other proofreading extension anymore.

Great suggestions, but hiding correction suggestions (a core feature) behind a paywall is rather unsatisfactory. As a student on a tight budget, this won't do.

Works great with overleaf!!

I used Writefull only a few times but felt it seemed a powerful tool for writing for me so far. I have been using Grammarly for the last few years and will try Writefull this year instead because it is useful for me that Writefull checks English while writing documents on Overleaf.

I use the app for any writing, whether it is emails or scientific writing. Wonderful app. Highly recommended.

I wrrote my thesis with Overleaf and I Writefull was very usefull and uncomplicated to use. Thanks!

It could be really good and really useful, but my short test revealed it missing some really simple stuff - e.g. " This is and introduction section. I want to see if writefull works here. " It didn't pick up on the misuse of and in the first sentence :(. I will go back to using overleaf text are and grammarly - although the integration is pretty horrible! If it does start to work well, I will definitely consider paying for a plan as I use overleaf all the time!

My account is still marked "FREE" after I upgrade to the premium. Could you please help?. Edit: Juan helped me immediately after I sent email to Writefull customer service last weekend. I much appreciated your help. And I love the Writefull premium features.

For me as a non-native English speaker (and writer), Writefull really helped me getting better and more compact writing. Honestly, I cannot tell whether it's better than other packages, like Grammarly, because I haven't tested that. Still, academic writing is a challenge and I guess it will always remains a challenge, even when using Writefull, but at least it gives you more options to choose from: especially the language search tool (in the Premium version) helped me to construct better part of my discussion of my last paper for my PhD thesis. I would recommend Writefull, especially because it's not that expensive (in my opinion it was worth it paying).

I used Writefull on overleaf to write an academic essay. I found it really useful to correct grammatical errors and some expressions. It has a really high rate of success: Only few times I had a wrong or useless suggestion. There are also other really usefull functions such as language search and sentence palette which helped me a lot when I did not know how to continue. Anyway, the most useful tool, in my opinion, is the paraphraser. It lets you to write a sentence and choose the change level (low, medium, high) to obtain a new and correct sentence with the same meanings. It is useful to avoid repetitions, to know the correct form of a sentence or if you are not sure about the word you used. Overall, writefull it is a great and useful surprise, it can be better and needs to improve, but I think it can help anyway

Writefull is the most game-changing, least advertised, best automated language checker there is right now. I am an electrical engineer and I was working on my master’s thesis in electrical and computer engineering when I first heard about Writefull through Digital Sciences, which Overleaf is also a part of. Clearly, I am not a native-born English speaker. My name has diacritics! Ranked by fluency, my first (mother) language is Portuguese, and by a twist of fate, my second is French. English is my third! Although my command of the language is fine, and my vocabulary in the English language is greater than that of my second language’s, in academic and technical writing, idiomatic prose is surprisingly hard to make. These two genres are incredibly formulaic, to the point that small deviations from some unspoken “standard” use of language that is clear to native speakers yet indistinguishable to non-natives come off as loud transgressions. As a result, it is not uncommon to have completely valid papers rejected on the basis of language, even if your research is on par (and you seemingly find no fault in your use of language). Look, I have read all those Strunk and White-type “style guides” and I hate them. Blanket recommendations for unimaginative minds. The guides and those who recommend them. But I digress. My point is, I have gone through those guides and they make no sense for the academic and technical writing you see in engineering. I am not stupid, I read a lot so I can write a little, I have a general sense of what to write. I just need a second pair of eyes to “standardize” my use of language. Finally, this is where Writefull shines. All those Grammarly-type apps? To me: Strunk and White-type language checking tools. They keep trying to babysit clauses that make perfect sense in engineering and ignore the idiomatic academic English “standardization” that is so hard to achieve. I learned about Writefull through blog posts, where two amazing applied linguists share brief insights on the inner workings of the product they work on. I am now working on my doctoral dissertation. I have used it to proofread and edit numerous projects of mine and others since. Writefull has my full endorsement.

I'm using Writefull for Overleaf premium for my PhD thesis and academic papers. Given it is a relatively new product, there are some things to improve (for example if a sentence starts with an acronym using \gls{}, it skips the acronym and suggests to start the next word with a capital letter!) but apart from these minor (more advanced LaTeX specific commands), it is absolutely great!! I enjoy that it shows prediction accuracy percentages, it helps me figure out where I can trust the AI (when it say 100%) or where I need to add my own judgment as well! Also, it is clearly designed for researchers by researchers! I have used other more generic proofreading software as well, but it is really clearly calibrated for academic writing! I also feel like it is smarter than Grammarly, I haven't done a 1:1 comparison, but with Grammarly I used to get a lot more non-sense suggestions. On the other hand, Grammarly has sentence structure suggestions (e.g., long or passive sentences ) that I haven't got any of these with Writefull, maybe my writing is now much better that I don't have any issues, or perhaps it is a missing (yet to be added) feature in Writefull for Overleaf extension. Re the premium features: At first, I was doubtful about the "Language Search" tool, but now I am using it a lot - it is very useful for when you know the term or the combination of terms but you are not sure how to use it in a sentence! The "Sentence Pallete" tool is not my favourite, although it is great to have a list of academic sentence example, there are already plenty of these lists on the internet that one can download for free, and there is nothing unique about it. Of course, it would have been great if Writefull was suggesting academic sentences (like Gmail auto-complete feature), but at the moment it is just a lookup table - not that it is a bad thing to have, just there is nothing special about it! Overall, I think it is a much needed and great product, with a lot of goodies and potential, and things that I believe will improve over time. I will happily continue using it and will definitely recommend it to others!

This is a nice tool to have. The Grammarly clearly beats Writefull down in Word (Grammarly's language skills are wider/deeper, at least in the paid version). However, Writefull is the only advance option I know for Overleaf. There is a bug in the current Writefull (version 2021.11.0) for Overleaf. If my laptop/notebook (with Windows 10) goes to sleep/hibernation, it looses the network connection. When the user wakes the notebook up and logs back into Windows, the Overleaf and Writefull have no network connection. As the Overleaf finds the network connection, the Writefull is still unable to function. Usually, the user needs to re- log-in into Writefull. However, if the user does not realise that the Writefull is offline (which is the first 10 times of trying to figure out what is wrong), it becomes very tricky to get Writefull running again. Even pressing F5 and reloading the page does not seem to help. One needs to kill the tab and open a new Overleaf session and log in into Writefull to restore Writefull's operation. It would be good if this would not be necessary.

I am Master student and writing my thesis right now. English is not native to me and I can struggle with some aspects of the language. I do most of the writing in overleaf, which spelling correction functionality is not as versatile as I would like it to be. I think Writefull complete overleaf in this aspect. ​It is still in active development but serves the purpose. Support is very responsive. Give it a try.

You really should try this add-in on your next Overleaf project. Highly recommended for proofreading your papers, proposals, reports, etc.

Very useful and it works perfectly with Overleaf.

Does not work in self-hosted overleaf instances. Although the plugin is great and the suggestions are accurate, the fact that even the paid version does not work in self-hosted overleaf is a no-go. This type of bundling with another application is a consumer rip-off.

I used it to check a couple academic documents on Overleaf. For one document, only 4 out of 106 suggested edits were correct. As such, it has some minimal value in highlighting errors, but at a massive Type I error rate. I also picked up a few grammatical errors it missed, so the Type II error rate isn't great either. The second document had similarly high Type I error rates. A lot of its suggestions were stylistic, where a simple "reject all" option would be useful. However, there were some suggestions that were simply grammatically incorrect due to poor processing of the surrounding text (e.g., suggesting using a singular adjective instead of a plural adjective on a clearly plural subject), or represented superfluous use of the word "the" before nouns (which is both grammatically awkward and harms concision). As such, maybe it will be useful once the model underlying it is improved, but it doesn't seem very useful otherwise, at least for reasonably clean documents. I like the concept though, as having a more robust set of editing tools in Overleaf would be great. As a side note, it does claim to have 91 "premium" suggestions to make in the first document, so it is possible the missed errors are caught but not highlighted. But that is rather difficult to know on my end, and I certainly won't pay for premium to found out given the poor performance of the visible suggestions.

Writefull is very feasible for non-native English speaking researchers who have to write a lot with overleaf. The development team is also responsible and active.

Great tool! A must have for every writer in overleaf.

Very useful and powerful application. Still in development, but the use in Words and Overleaf is very great. I am looking forward to implement it in Outlook and other programs. Keep going, your app is promising !

I am an experienced overleaf user, published a dozen papers there recently. I tried the previous version of Writefull, and It did not work properly for me. After reporting bugs, they fixed them in a new version. Now I like this product a lot. It is not as user-friendly as Grammarly, but it has deeper linguistic analysis and -- the main advantage--- it really understands Latex, so you can work interactively in overleaf. With Grammarly, I had to keep copying the whole Latex text to the Grammarly window. Once there, it worked, but still, I give Writefull a higher mark. The only annoying feature of this version is the lack of navigation around the highlighted suggestions -- you have to scroll the whole text every time. I reported this bug as well, so I hope to see the fix soon. Keep up the good work!

I was a Masters student when I was introduced to this tool. I used the overleaf extension to help my writing. My experience was mostly good. I liked the user experience. It was comforting and the AI suggestions were accurate. My suggestion is to start writing and correcting the errors then and there with it. Otherwise, when you have over 200 lines of text and if there are lots of errors... you'll have a tough time using the tool.

Hi everyone, I am gonna share my experience with Writefull. I am PhD student and using this tool while writing my thesis and in following science articles. It is a great tool for working in Overleaf. I have used several others before, but Writefull is definitely the best one. Of course there are some mistakes which might be annoying, but my experience with trouble repairing by Writefull team is great. I have reported a problem (I used "ambient" mode and Writefull plugin just shaded the incorrect word by red color which makes it invisible-ambient mode has black background) - I wrote it to the support and in several hours Juan wrote me thankful email for this feedback and repair this problem immediately. I hope that more people will feedback their problems and the Writefull gets briliant. Best greeting, Josef, Czech Republic

I used Writefull for Overleaf for a couple of days now. My initial feedback is really positive! It’s quite handy and usuable! Most of the suggestions made sense and are applied seamlessly. I played around a couple of exiting overleaf files and happy so far! Thank you :)