Grammarly Review

I’m always a bit sceptical about tools that claim to improve your grammar and, as a result, your writing. Maybe that’s because I’m a professional writer with an excellent command of the language and its rules. (I even know when it’s OK to break them.) But I couldn’t help but be intrigued by Grammarly, which claims to be ‘the world’s most accurate grammar checker’, so I decided to check it out. After all, it couldn’t possibly be worse than Microsoft Word’s tool, could it? According to the site, 300,000 students as well as international business people and bloggers are using it to provide:

• 150+ Grammar Checks — Check your text for the proper use of advanced grammar rules. Get accurate error explanations.

• Plagiarism Detection — Find borrowed text before it gets you into trouble. Automatically generate references.

• Vocabulary Enhancement — Use words that make an impact. Liven up your sentences and improve readability with context-optimized word choice suggestions.

• Contextual Spell Check — Spot correctly spelled words used in the wrong context. No more embarrassing typos like then-than, to-two-too, lose-loose.

It can also check citations, and features an in-line editor.

Grammarly in Action

Here’s what happened when I put it to the test.

I pasted a 900 word blog post into the checking window, selected ‘blog post’ as the type of content I was checking, pressed the review button and waited a short time. It found 53 issues, each of which had a pop up card with short and long explanations of the grammar point being flagged. You could even vote on whether the information was useful before moving on. How many of those did I agree with? Here are the notes I made as I was going along.

• Incorrectly saw the ‘in’ in LinkedIn as a preposition at the end of a sentence — perhaps that needed to be added to the dictionary.

• Pronouns — though I didn’t agree with the error it highlighted, it indicated that I could have omitted one pronoun.

• In one sentence, it didn’t pick up that picture was being used as a verb and flagged it incorrectly.

• Grammarly correctly found one missing comma around the phrase ‘of course’.

• Then to the spell check — it didn’t recognize blogging ( in this day and age, come on! ) but at least it offered the option to assume the word was correct.

• Did plain text need a hyphen? Perhaps!

• It didn’t pick up my bullets on copy and paste so incorrectly flagged lower case letters.

• Some people might find the tips on word choice helpful, but didn’t do much for me. When I described something as beautiful, that’s what I meant, not beauteous, divine or lovely.

• Perhaps where I used good, I could have replaced it with brilliant or nifty.

Out of 53 issues, I agreed with 3 or 4, and I loved the ability to save the grammar report as a PDF.

Testing Academic Grammar

My second test was with a dissertation excerpt ( the other categories are academic essay, report, book review, research paper, presentation and business document). It found very few errors, disliked the use of square brackets and ignored Harvard referencing which is common in UK academic institutions. However, it did give examples of how to fix the references using three forms of referencing common in the US. This would be extremely useful to students, who often struggle with this area.

I performed the test again on a piece of writing I knew was flawed (I won’t say who it came from) and it correctly identified spelling and punctuation errors (though I would have loved to see some word choice suggestions. For this person, who struggles to write clearly, Grammarly definitely has some potential benefits.

Good Grammarly Features

Things I liked about Grammarly included:

• being able to see a summary report with one click — there’s a link at the top of the screen

• as much or as little explanation of errors as you can cope with

• the plagiarism checker — I checked this with a post I knew had been scraped and correctly identified it as 100% plagiarized, though it didn’t find the original source

• the fact that you can choose from several different types of documents.

• the ability to ask questions about grammar points from the review screen via a pop up form — answers appear on http://answers.grammarly.com/

• the online grammar handbook — http://handbook.grammarly.com/

• the grammar checker is better than the one in Microsoft Word, in my opinion

Who is Grammarly for?

Most of the writers I know write too well to need a tool like Grammarly, but as a teacher, I knew plenty of students and beginning writers who could have used the help. Like other tools of the type, Grammarly isn’t a substitute for knowing the rules yourself, but if you’re a poor writer, it can help you improve. A year’s subscription will set you back $7.95 a month, but there are 20% increases for quarterly and monthly plans.