The Secret to Writing Easily – Grammarly
Grammarly has been around since 2009, but its only in the past couple of years that it has successfully established itself as an essential application for writers and editors. While it’s easy to summarise Grammarly as a proofreading application, Grammarly’s attention to detail, brilliant user interface, and suite of proofing tools offer much more than your average spellchecker.
Below we take a deep dive into Grammarly and its features, along with the advancements the proofreading platform is looking to integrate in the future.
The Power of a Personal Writing Assistant
As soon as you start writing in Grammarly’s editor, you’ll probably see the assistant icon already spinning as a sign it’s checking over your words. With two main different types of checks split into “critical issues” and “advanced issues”, Grammarly also features a plagiarism detector.
The “critical issues” Grammarly finds are underlined in red, including grammar mistakes, punctuation errors, and other incorrect grammatical structures. Anything underlined in yellow are grammar suggestions and vocabulary suggestions to help you keep your word choice fresh.
Editing Taken to the Next Level
While many people see Grammarly as a glorified spellchecker, the amount Grammarly has taught me about my writing and grammatical tendencies is invaluable. From correcting my overlooked Americanisms to berating me for my sentences written in the passive voice, Grammarly’s corrections are in depth and well explained.
Every correction or suggestion, Grammarly will have a full breakdown of the grammatical concept or issue you seem to be struggling with. With multiple examples and various suggested corrections, with Grammarly you always know what you’ve gotten wrong and why.
Learn from your Writing Mistakes
Perhaps one of the greatest features is how it follows up with you every week about how you’ve used the app and your writing tendencies. At the end of every week you receive a weekly progress report which includes statistics about your general productivity, writing accuracy and word variation compared to other Grammarly users.
Just as important is their inclusion of your top three most common mistakes when writing. For example, thanks to Grammarly I know that I’ve got a slight problem when it comes to remembering my commas after introductory phrases or clauses. Now that I know about it, I’ve taken active steps to improve my writing and general grammar.
AI Editing and the Future of Grammarly
While Grammarly already stands as a titan in the proofreading software sector, they’ve been looking at other ways they can improve their service and functionality. Joel Tetreault, the Grammarly director of research, recently posted an article about using AI processes to help users choose the right level of formality when writing a piece of content.
With an algorithm that draws on almost endless amounts of user data, Grammarly has been taking steps to build an assistant that will help you choose how you want to communicate your writing.
Go Pro with Grammarly Premium
While their AI formality editing is still in development, Grammarly has steadily been adding features like the document type selector. Only available for premium users, this feature lets you choose what kind of document you’re writing, from academic essay to creative scriptwriting. This way the edits you receive are relevant to the genre and type of document you’re preparing.
Grammarly’s paid premium subscription also includes notifications for advanced grammatical issues, contextual word suggestions and a plagiarism detector. After having used the premium version for a few weeks now, it’s clearly a brilliant application that any writer or editor should use to improve their writing abilities.