Throughout college and well into my career, I’ve had an extraordinary asset in my toolbelt, the Grammarly application. Even the most sophisticated and well-taught writers often make mistakes, and besides having a professional editor on the payroll, applications such as Grammarly provide the means to correct and enhance writing of all styles. Offering a wide range of helpful editing tools, Grammarly truly helps one get the most out of their writing whether it is correcting simple spelling mistakes to more complicated cases of sentence structure issues. Offering a free install of the app, Grammarly checks writing within emails, Word documents, and even website use, most in real-time. Grammarly’s Premium service includes customized scans for various document types, plagiarism checkers, and tools for increasing and diversifying vocabulary. While the Premium version costs quite a bit ($29.95 a month/$139.95 a year), there are several discount codes one can obtain (I found a 50% off a year coupon). Additionally, there is a Business account, costing $10 per member (3-user minimum).

Grammarly includes native desktop clients for both macOS and Windows, numerous browser extensions for Chrome and Edge, as well as Android and iOS functionalities. Grammarly works by scanning your writing against its anonymously collected data from its users, thus requiring an internet connection. From an IT standpoint, I was concerned that the app was too similar to a keylogger, however, found that it is pretty secure as it only accesses what you wish and is blocked from accessing anything in fields where you indicated that sensitive information would reside. The layout of the app is very straightforward and easy to learn and allows the user to fine-tune their writing styles such as academic, creating, and technical, as well as set writing goals such as to describe, inform, tell a story, or to convince.

My favorite features of the app are the word count and repetitive terms checker (for some reason I love using the word ‘however’). Even with all of my college-level writing classes, I find new ways to improve my writing every time I use the app. Another interesting thing is that Grammarly will send you emails concerning your achievements as well as comparing you to the rest of Grammarly’s user database. For example, per the last email that I received, I was 87% more productive, 81% more accurate, and used 72% more unique words than other users. Grammarly also informs you of your top mistakes and words you misspell most frequently. Overall, I would recommend Grammarly to anyone who wishes to take their writing to the next level, even if it is only used to combat embarrassing spelling errors in Facebook posts. Thanks for reading and check out Grammarly’s site here for more information.

https://www.grammarly.com/