WhiteSmoke Reviews

WhiteSmoke works well on every report that our field technician sends to the manager. The manager then matches the report and sends it to the operations supervisor, using WhiteSmoke to mix the reports with different types of entries while eliminating errors. The result is a fast and consistent document.

Many current "style guides" seem to have rather conservative responses to analyzing the collection of text and sentence structures present in the document being reviewed. I wanted to get a more interactive experience about improving grammar.

the system doesn't work and many times where I try to upload with no results

no customer support and the answer i get for the problem was very unproffesional here are the sample :hank you for contacting us, I would love to assist you. Unfortunately, there are many reasons for all kinds of malfunctions.I suggest you get the help of someone professional on your side who might be able to solve the problem. I apologize in advance for not being able to help you beyond that. Best Regards,WhiteSmoke Support

Whitesmoke has accurate spellcheck. It offers style guides, punctuation check, and grammar check.
One thing I really liked was that corrections are displayed above the error, vs the error only being marked or highlighted.
Whitesmoke can be used in Microsoft Word and in your web browser. The pricing is acceptable.

I had problems keeping documents in their original format and I've noticed that the grammar check and punctuation check aren't always accurate.
Whitesmoke doesn't offer a free version.

At the start WhiteSmoke worked well on my Mac with MS Office, but now it doesn't work on a Mac at all.

I bought the Lifetime plan, but then after some updates and you find that they force you to "upgrade again" even after buying the Lifetime plan. So then your left with a web-based version only and again they cancel your account unless you write and complain, then they reinstate it for a short while and then cancel it again. There are no updates, it was only version 8 of the web-based software. I have bought other Lifetime grammar checkers which have not given me these problems.

Easy to use, when it works. Does what it has to do.

Unreliable in their business approach. After several years they try to get you to pay again for life long licenses. Despicable behavior.

I started using WhiteSmoke when I was a newbie content writer. I loved it because it was easy to use and genuinely taught me how to be a better writer. I learned what errors I usually made and how to correct them, which made me feel very confident publishing work or submitting it to clients.

The service was terrible. I purchased a lifetime "anywhere" (online/ cloud) subscription and it would lock me out on an annual basis, telling me my "free" version expired. Customer service would take days to respond and it would take a week or more before it would come back. When they'd finally respond, which sometimes took several messages spread out over several weeks, they'd talk to me like I should be grateful they were even answering. Considering I wrote for a living and was producing four or five pieces per day, not having access to the proofing tool I paid for was crippling.

The most salient feature of WhiteSmoke is a spell check. It's confusing sometimes because it does not always show correctly subject and verb agreement. It's time-consuming, trying to see what's wrong when there's nothing wrong.

The program will often stop in the middle of reviewing, which is also exasperating. It may be something I am not doing, but I must "call up" the program, using f2, rather than have it visible and available whenever I need it. If you could provide information about that, I'd appreciate it.

I love that I am able to very easily add a custom dictionary- we often use words internally that appear like jargon to the spellchecker and can't be counted as part of a complete sentence- rather than wasting time of our managers to correct these errors, we add the abbreviations as words and speed along in reviews.

Many of the pre-existing "style guides" seem like they are canned responses rather than analyzing the corpus of text and sentence structures that are present in a document that is being reviewed. I had hoped for a more interactive experience on grammar improvement.

I like knowing 95% of the time White Smoke finds and corrects my spelling errors.

It doesn't do a good job of catching the grammatical errors. It also often doubles and triples line of text. Other times it deletes items. It is madding when you have an email only to have White Smoke "bastardize" it so much with it duplication or it deletions that it doesn't look anything like your email at all.

On occation it delete my entire email or word document.