Grammarly Review

by Morgan Shafer

Description

Grammarly is an online spell and grammar checking application that helps users find and correct English writing issues.

It provides context and correction suggestions for more than 250 types of spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, enhances vocabulary usage, suggests citations, and detects plagiarism. 

Grammarly’s algorithms flag potential issues in the text and provide context and suggested corrections, enabling users to make informed decisions about whether, and how, to correct an issue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrSPNuzBgQc

Access

The full website is https://app.grammarly.com/, but you can type in grammarly.com, and you will be redirected to the proper page to get started.

Monthly plan: $29.95/month

Quarterly plan: $19.98/month, billed as one $59.95 payment

Yearly plan: $11.58/month, billed as one $139.95 payment

Grammarly also offers enterprise subscriptions for bulk users in K-12, higher education, enterprises and government (shown below).

Sample Usage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nymmxNvthyA

Below are before and after screenshots of how Grammarly can transform your text.

Tips, tricks, and tutorials

You do have to pay to use the service, but there is a 7-day free trial so that users can cancel the subscription if they don't like it (or just needed to use it once or twice).

Grammarly can be used in conjunction with Microsoft Word (via the Plug-in feature). Tutorial below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkLGRRfXNj8

http://support.grammarly.com/entries/23052887-Learn-how-Grammarly-MS-Office-add-in-works

**This can be an extremely useful tool for students who need to use Turnitin.com for papers. Using Grammarly prior to turning a paper in on Turnitin.com, students can get a much better idea of the corrections Turnitin would find--which helps to improve their grades for each assignment.

What the Tool Does Well

Grammarly is pretty close to the student version of Turnitin.com. It can help anyone improve virtually any piece of text--from research papers and portfolios for school, to write-ups or proposals for a business. Simply copy and paste, or upload, the text into Grammarly to get started. From there, Grammarly checks spelling and grammar, plagiarism, and even gives hints and ideas for enhancing the paper.

It is very easy to work in since the user can simply click on the suggested corrections to fix errors.

The plagiarism scan not only shows what has been plagiarized and by what percent, but also provides MLA, APA, and Chicago style citations for the user/writer to include to correct the mistake.

For sentence and wording corrections, Grammarly provides explanations as to why something is incorrect, as well as examples of why it is incorrect and how to improve those so that it is easy to see how to fix your own mistakes.

In addition, Grammarly continuously self-scans when corrections are made. It will keep providing hints until the user makes the correct fix. Once the fix is grammatically correct, Grammarly puts a large green check mark at the top right of the screen (shown below).

Grammarly also provides a synonym finder to improve the language of writing (without all the hassle of looking up synonyms on various websites).

What it Does Poorly

Documents limitation: You can check up to 300 documents or 150,000 words in any 30-day period, or 100 documents or 50,000 words in any 24-hour period. (If you are an Enterprise Subscriber, this restriction applies to each of your Authorized Users.

Pages limitation: You can check up to 20 pages at a time when you are using Grammarly online at www.grammarly.com.

However, there is no pages limitation when you are using Grammarly in your MS Word and Outlook.

Grammarly may also take a few minutes to search through the user's paper and load the errors and suggestions.

Scores are given for the user before and after corrections are made. Some corrections may be bypassed by users (for example, keeping the word 'you'/second person in an online blog that typically is in second person). Even though the corrections have been looked over and bypassed by the user, Grammarly still sees them as an error, and does not improve the initial score because of this. Some users find this to be a slight annoyance, because they want better scores (and don't see things they have purposely kept as an issue towards the score).

For certain corrections, i.e. dangling modifiers, that some writers may have a more difficult time correcting, Grammarly provides two incorrect examples, along the side, and only one correct example of how to correct it (example below). It could be argued that this should be opposite. After all, more positive, correct information is what the writer is striving for, so more correct, rather than incorrect information, could arguably help someone out slightly better.

What happens when you...

Users can actually cancel and re-add subscriptions so that they are not charged the relatively high rate to use this application.
Although it is definitely not an honest challenge to the system, it is definitely an affordance the user can do to use the application, rather than accepting it at face value.

Additional Resources

https://app.grammarly.com/

http://www.grammarly.com/download/chrome?email=bertievg@mweb.co.za&utm_source=grammarly&utm_medium=email&utm_term=free_plugin&utm_content=A%20Free%20Spellchecker%20for%20Facebook,%20Gmail%20and%20More!&utm_campaign=browser_extension

In addition to Grammarly, the company has an extended version called Grammarly Lite (absolutely free). Grammarly Lite (link above) is used alongside social media extensions (Facebook, GMail, Twitter, Tumblr, and LinkedIn) for thesaurus, dictionary, and spell-checking needs.

While Grammarly, or even Grammarly Lite, can be used to check errors, enhance language and spelling, and check for plagiarism on, perhaps the digital text (wiki, blog, twitter, etc.) portion for the portfolio project, there are competitive products that can do similar work.

Competitive products: There are probably a million of competitive grammar-checking applications. Many of them are quick--allowing the user to copy and paste words into a box and see a few generated errors. This is useful for those just wanted to quickly get a sentence or two checked. But when someone, say a student writing a dissertation, or a business professional writing a proposal, needs a professional, error-free paper, Grammarly wins...hands down. It can be costly, but provides the quality to back up the cost.

Below are a couple of competitive products:

http://spellcheckplus.com/ (Cheaper than grammarly, and can actually be used free if the user is willing to give up some quality. Otherwise, if a subscription is purchased, it doesn't quite capture all punctuation issues. 

http://www.onlinecorrection.com/

(Free, but definitely gives up a lot of quality for the no-charge cost. But it is a quick go-to for those who do not want to take the time to sign up for subscriptions).