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If You Hate Grammar (Or Just Aren’t Good At It), This Lifehack Is For You

We live in the “life hack” era where everyone is looking for ways to streamline how they work and live. 
One of the ways many people try to save time is by skimping in the testing and review area. I’ve seen it done many times at clients testing big financial systems, and have come across several bloggers in the #Blogchat twitter chat who openly admit not proofreading their stuff until it’s already published or someone calls them out on it. In fact, I’ve been called out a couple of times recently for some shoddy proofreading :/

Coincidentally, the latest reprimand came the same day as another email. This other email from a company called Grammarly asking if I would try out their product. Considering my need for an extra set of eyes and my current lack of budget for the blog, I agreed to have a look and see if it made sense to share with my readers. If you do a lot of written communication, whether for school or for work, you definitely want to keep reading.

What does Grammarly Do?

Grammarly does a few different things. At a high level, it’s a web-based grammar checking tool which updates as you write and not only suggests corrections but gives the rationale behind it. 

Grammarly editor

Grammarly review card


Grammarly also gives you the option to specify the type of document you’re writing and will call you out on use of contractions or colloquialisms if not appropriate for the type of document you’re writing academic writing. In the picture below, you’ll see Grammarly has a number of sub-types within each document type to narrow down what it should expect from your document. 

 
Grammarly doc type

 

Depending on the document type you choose, Grammarly recommends you eliminate words when you have words which don’t add value. A number of other options are provided based on what you want Grammarly to check, and each can be toggled on/off for any document at any time:
  • Contextual Spelling helps to ensure homphones are used correctly so you don’t fall victim to the there/their/they’re trap 
  • Grammar addresses issues such as unclear sentence subject
  • Punctuation lets you know about missing or misues commas and periods
  • Style looks for redundancy in your writing and wordiness
  • Vocabulary Use provides suggestions to diversify you word choice
  • Plagarism checks against database with billions of references to determine originality of your writing
Grammarly has multiple options it can check for you

On top of that, Grammarly provides professional proofreaders to read your documents once the magic grammar robot and you take a first pass at the edits. I didn’t actually try this so I can’t vouch for the quality of the proofreader but I thought 
 
Grammarly proofreader
 

How Easy is Grammarly to Use?

 

Grammarly has a simple, intuitive interface. To have a document checked by Grammarly you can upload a file (formats?), paste into the Grammarly, or type directly into the text editor. In terms of how it looks, the interface reminded me a little bit of Evernote’s “card view” so if you use that this will feel familiar to you. Aside from that, you type away and Grammarly will make suggestions and keep score along the way.
If grammar is a blind spot for you or you just want to see how it works, click here to try Grammarly for free. 

Note: This is an affiliate link, so I’ll receive a small commission if you try the product. Thanks for your support!

In my testing of the tool, I will say Grammary wasn’t flawless but it definitely gave me more comfort that the piece I was writing was error free.

I know a lot of people out there don’t take kindly to having machines do everything, so let me know how YOU use this in the comments or if you’ll keep it old school and do it yourself. If I get enough feedback, I’ll post the results.

Comments

  1. I’ve heard of Grammarly (the website), but not this. Very interesting. I will definitely check this out; I especially like things like contextual spelling checks. A regular spell check doesn’t catch everything.

  2. Hey Patrick I was a little hesitant at first but impressed with the functionality. I was intrigued by it. Im curious about the pro proofreader option. Going to give it a try this week and see how that works.

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