No-pain grammar checks

I’ve just been introduced to a new service on the Internet which claims to help users of the English language with their grammar. You know how difficult this language can be and although I had gone through my education mainly in this language, I have to admit that occasionally I am still stymied enough in my work.

You can check out Grammarly’s website here.

Therefore, you can guess how eagerly I embraced this instant grammar check website when I first got to know of it. Naturally, I have been trying it out. The service checks for grammar, punctuation, writing style and word usage. I find it largely adequate although I couldn’t agree totally with their suggestions when the website thinks that I’ve made a grammatical mistake. English grammar is such that most times, you have to give a lot of artistic leeway to informal and personal expressions.

There are two ways to have your text checked. The obvious first way is to cut and paste from your document. The second way is to upload the document itself. Either way, the Grammarly engine will go through the text and throw back their suggestions at you.

One of the interesting features on the menu is a check for plagiarism, although I’ve not quite managed to work out yet what exactly this function does because all my writings are original stuff. Does Grammarly check to see whether you have plagiarised other people’s work or vice-versa?

As I mentioned earlier, the service does an adequate enough job. Some of the details checked by Grammarly include misuse of articles, incorrect prepositions, pronoun usage, incomplete comparisons, squinting modifiers (wow, what’s that?), spelling and typo mistakes. It even suggested adding or removing punctuations and that sort of thing. But there are too many instances when I had to ignore the suggestions and plumb for my own style of writing. And after everything’s done and complete, Grammarly allows you to download the revised text or document.

But by and large, Grammarly is a good service that can help aspiring writers with their English. Students should find Grammarly useful as an aid for their written assignments. There’s even a Grammarly plug-in for Microsoft Word and Outlook. Hope you can give it a try too. There is a free trial of seven days for new users.

Interested? Here’s the Grammarly website again.

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