Grammarly

How many times have you sent an email with a typo which you regretted later? We have all made mistakes when writing, no matter how many writing courses we have passed or articles we have published. What we need is an assistant at our side to check our writing and correct our mistakes constantly. Grammarly is precisely this: A free online spelling and grammar checker. You can add it as an extension to your browser to check your spelling mistakes when you write an email, or you can add it to your Microsoft Word as an add-on to check your Word files. Either way, Grammarly has proven to be almost indispensable when it comes to writing.

As a Microsoft Word add-on, Grammarly appears on top of the screen, next to other menu titles. By opening it, you have a range of options to check for free: spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and style. There are also suggestions with regard to genre, vocabulary use, and plagiarism which are available to premium users.

After you finish writing your document in Microsoft Word, you can open Grammarly by clicking on its green icon. In the next step, you must select the options to check. The longer your text and the more options you select, the more time Grammarly needs to go through your document. Still, it works considerably fast.

In the sample text above, Grammarly was asked to check spelling and grammar. You can see the results on the right pane: It found three critical issues with the document, which are explained in detail and also underscored within the text. The first problem was a grammatical one; the word send must be changed into sent. The second was a spelling mistake (assistant). Finally, the third one was a grammatical mistake where an adjective (considerable) was used instead of an adverb (considerably). You can apply each change by clicking on the mistake found in the right pane. You can also learn more about each mistake by clicking “more,” displayed under some of these errors. If Grammarly has made a mistake and marked a correct word or expression as erroneous (and Grammarly is not infallible), you can click on “ignore” to ignore this case in the document. Like other spelling and grammar checkers, you must exercise your own judgment as to the usefulness of Grammarly’s suggestions.

When you finish correcting all the mistakes in the document, you will see a green check mark instead of the alarming red circle with the error count. Keep in mind that Grammarly needs an active Internet connection to function, which is just a minor drawback to this otherwise useful and indispensable add-on.