Grammarly Review - A Virtual Assistant For Your Writing Problems

There are two things which create the impression of a person towards an audience, one is the way he dresses and the other is the way he speaks or writes. Today I am reviewing a software which will help keep up your credibility using the latter part.

We often find ourselves in a puzzle when we are making our college assignments or generally looking to check our sentence structure. Not everyone has the perfect English and even the best one can make mistakes. Even journalists have to write a lot every day and they don’t have time to proofread their work and similar to that, renowned authors need editors to check their work.

Grammarly is a service which intends to offer a solution to those whose first language isn’t English or just looking for a virtual assistant which can offer an extra set of eyes without being a drain on the financial resources. It offers vocabulary enhancer, over 250+ grammatical error checks, plagiarism detector and real-time suggestions to help you write according to the genre you want to write about.

Analysing Grammarly Features

You know the difference between formal and informal writing? We are often confused by our writing style whether it is suitable for certain situations or not. Grammarly, in this case, can help out in sentence structuring and help people with little to no command in English sound like they are native or bilingual speakers of the language.

Grammarly has a feature which can help you write according to a specific genre and it is useful because writing important emails to your boss should sound different versus some other conversation. It can help regarding the use of words for respective situations and can even help you sound more positive.

The most interesting and useful feature of Grammarly, in my opinion, is certainly the vocabulary enhancer which provides suggestions to users regarding certain words which could have a more slick synonym. For example, you can say “A good product” but Grammarly would provide you with the option to replace good with some more sophisticated such as “A virtuoso product” or an in more simpler terms “An accomplished product”.

Synonyms are important because we want to make sure that the paragraph has a rich vocabulary so that it can appeal to the reader. It is rightly said that words carry emotions so a more intricate vocabulary would definitely leave an everlasting impression.

This feature is so powerful that students who are looking to improve their English can use it to find alternative words which can help impress the teacher. They can also use it for debates as well.

Also when you are reading online, the browser extension can provide instant definitions for difficult words using a simple double click so that you can learn them by heart.

The second most common problem which Grammarly addresses is sentence structuring and grammatical errors. From the use of tenses in a paragraph to overly using passive voice in sentences, Grammarly offers real-time suggestions to help improve grammar in your work making it cleaner and error-free.

The problem regarding the use of tenses is quite common and if it isn’t addressed, the reader may get the opposite meaning of a story you are telling. Some people find themselves ending sentences with prepositions or just making wordy sentences just because they don’t read much, Grammarly can help change all that. Even something as simple as apostrophe mistakes are often neglected and can be spotted using it.

And Grammarly is able to look for more than 200+ grammatical errors so even the biggest grammar nazi wouldn’t be able to spot mistakes in your writing. Plus it not only spots those errors but it also gives an in-depth explanation regarding the grammar mistake as well as highlighting the general usage for quantifiers and general grammatical terms which can improve your writing when you don’t have Grammarly with you.

Another frequent problem which often perturbs webmasters is plagiarism. While guest authors can provide informative content for one’s blog but it is often a question mark whether it is copied from another website or not. Grammarly can easily cross reference the article with over 8 billion online pages to check the authenticity of the article. This means less time spent for the webmaster to do all that manually.

The issue of plagiarism is very important because it can affect the general rankings of the website. Google is one of the prime sources of traffic to most online web publishers and after that, you have Social Media. Even advertisers judge the reputability of a platform by judging the quality of the content. And if they find out that the content has been plagiarised, then you can expect your revenues to take a major dip.

With Grammarly Premium, users no longer have to worry about purchasing extra licenses just to check the originality of their web content. Considering that Grammarly already has done the hard part, webmasters can focus on creating quality content with a worry free mind.

Real Time Usage

Working with Grammarly is an ease since it is always scanning the passage looking for errors. It has extensions for our favourite browsers and it can also be downloaded for Microsoft Word. When you download Grammarly for the first time, it asks you some questions for personalization of the app so that it can provide better suggestions such as whether you are a native English speaker or not and how good you are in English grammar.

Accordingly, the app will setup and help you with your tasks. Let’s take a look at the browser extension, those who blog can get real-time suggestions from the browser extension regarding errors. When researching online and you have found a difficult word which you don’t know, a simple double click on it will get you it’s definition and you will learn it by heart. This will eventually increase your vocabulary even more.

Similarly, those who work on assignments using Microsoft Word can use the desktop application to help sort out their errors by cross referencing against 150+ commonly made mistakes.

Evaluating Grammarly Premium

Grammarly Premium is able to point out advanced grammatical errors for as low as $29 a month which is absolutely nothing compared to the cost of hiring an actual proofreader. We get around 100+ additional grammar checks plus the app learns our writing style and offers suggestions based on the content.

We often make colloquial errors in our writing and these, in particular, aren’t easy to spot. Only someone who has studied English grammar and sentence structuring would be able to point them out but Grammarly is able to point out and fix these errors for you.

Grammarly Premium also includes the plagiarism checker which I have already discussed above. It can be a major time saver and can help webmasters publish only authentic content as well as helping teachers grade the students which have submitted assignments done by themselves, not a copy-paste from Wikipedia.

Talk about icing on the cake if you ask me because it actually encourages writers to develop a better style for their content and learn new words every day. It actually acts as the assistant that we always wanted and the extra set of eyes to point out mistakes before they reach the project manager.

If however, you find the price of the premium version to be expensive then there are numerous Grammarly discounts available online which can with more than 20% off the introductory price of the premium subscription of Grammarly on renowned websites such as Groupon and more.

Grammarly also has a special discount for educational institutions based on the number the students enrolled and they provide them yearly plans which give access to the students based.

Furthermore, if you purchase the yearly plan then the monthly cost goes further down to a mere $12/month which is pocket change for most people. If you are not satisfied, then you have a 7-day money back guarantee as well.

Comparison To Ginger Software

Ginger Software has cheaper premium plans prices but also with lesser features. They are doing the same work but it is a less powerful software as it doesn’t have genre specific writing which is available on Grammarly as well no plagiarism checker. Both of them have extensions and plugins available for the users but Grammarly has a much wider fanbase in comparison.

Genre Specific Writing Style is important because your virtual assistant should be aware what you are working on. Suppose I have a research topic for a college essay, it should be able to provide real-time suggestions and words to help make the essay informative while using rich vocabulary and also being grammatically and structurally correct.

Secondly, bloggers would have to go for a separate membership to check their articles for plagiarism which is one of the biggest problems of the internet and can lead to penalization from Google. If the articles are not checked for this, the webmaster’s site can lose its search engine optimisation and fall in rankings, which means lesser users and lesser revenue. An on board plagiarism checker means that you don’t have to worry about additional hassle and subscription for checking the originality of your content. Hence you will more time to create your content.

Pros:

• An extremely powerful grammatical checking tool. 

Grammarly is extremely powerful without any doubt. Even native speakers will find some errors in their writing using this software and help further improve their content. Those who find themselves in a difficulty

• Genre Specific Writing Style 

Grammarly can help adjust the tone of your language based on various situations such as formal emails to report writings to various companies and so on. It can provide keyword suggestions to you in order to make your writings more sophisticated and appealing to the reader.

• Vocabulary Builder 

We often find ourselves researching online for various words and to avoid repetition of the same words in our paragraphs, we spend more and more time Googling. Grammarly can offer instant suggestions without interfering with our workflow to increase word density as well as build our own vocabulary for future articles.

• Plagiarism Detector For Webmasters 

In addition to offering 150+ additional grammar checks in the premium version, Grammarly also gives webmasters the feature to check whether their articles are original or not. No longer do you need additional Copyscape licenses and subscriptions because Grammarly will cross reference your article with more than 8 Billion online pages to let you know whether your content is original or not.

Cons:

The most prominent negative point of Grammarly is perhaps no native integration to Wordpress which is actually the home of the internet publishers. While yes there is a browser app but Ginger software and other competitors have Wordpress integrations too and this is a field left wide open by Grammarly. They not only should have Wordpress integrations but also reach out to other online blog hosting providers such as Blogger or Square Space and have integrations for them too. Not only will it build their trust but also their credibility as a trusted service provider for English correction and improvement for journals and publishing agencies.

Grammarly is also pricier compared to its competitors but this isn’t exactly a con one should worry about because they bundle some sweet extra features which can pretty much add up to the extra cost. If one bought those services individually, it would cost a lot more extra.

Grammarly typically specialises in English, it doesn’t offer any translation services but then again it is not such a big issue.

Summing Up:

So, in the end, I would like to say that Grammarly is an intuitive and versatile platform for those who are looking for a virtual assistant to check their content for mistakes at a very affordable cost. There is nothing wrong with it and it offers many many features which can help make your writings even better than they are now.

Rating: 4.5/5