Today I am going to introduce a fantastic tool called Grammarly. It is a writing assistant (browser extension & app) that will help you improve your writing.
Thought I should share a useful tool that helped me write my blogs. English is not my 1st language and I faced a lot of problems while designing or writing my blog in English.
Two main things that always bothered me:
Sentence-construction
Use of proper words
Whenever we write something we tend to think in our native language and then we translate. I was doing the same for years and I was under the impression that I am doing a great job, but in reality, my blogs were constructed poorly and I realized that if you are a bad writer people do not trust you, no matter how good is your subject. That’s the fact!
And one day I came across this tool called Grammarly
What is Grammarly?
Grammarly works as a writing assistant.
It is a browser extension that you can download for free and start using while writing anything. Once installed successfully it automatically starts suggesting you for spelling mistakes, punctuation errors etc.
Features of Grammarly
Transform Whole Sentences for Clarity with Our New Writing Suggestions
We write tons of emails and messages throughout the workday. All too often, our busy schedules don’t leave us enough time to put adequate thought into how we word our messages. We cram these communications into those elusive breaks in between meetings or write at a fast pace just to keep up with the momentum of the workweek. And sometimes this means our messages don’t come across the way we intended. What might have been clear in our own heads isn’t understood that way by our readers, leading to time-consuming back-and-forths with colleagues, managers, or clients to get aligned.
I know how unsettling it can feel when you aren’t fully understood. Clarity suggestions, which help ensure that your wording is concise and clear to your audience. These suggestions help you identify passive voice, run-on sentences, or overly wordy paragraphs, any of which can make your writing hard to absorb.
Now Grammarly browser extension does you one better by not only flagging those issues but also offering Premium suggestions that help you rewrite entire sentences, so your point always comes across as intended. These full-sentence rewrites are a game-changer, streamlining the editing process by giving you concrete direction on how to transform your writing.
When it comes to writing clearly, one of the most common issues people have is constructing overly wordy or run-on sentences. No judgment! This tends to happen when we write hurriedly and want to translate all of our fast-moving ideas into words. The new and improved Grammarly browser extension is here to help.
When you open Grammarly, you’ll see a list of suggestions, organized by theme. Scroll down the list and you’ll find clarity suggestions indicated with a blue dot. Suggestions for wordy or run-on sentences will be indicated with a “Rephrase sentence” label. Click into it to find your original sentence rewritten as two sentences or with fewer, more direct words that make the message clearer and more straightforward.
Regardless of the specific issue the suggestion is solving, with one click of the “Replace with This Version” button, voila—your writing will be much clearer than before. If you simply want to see the new, cleaned-up version, you can uncheck the “Highlight Changes” box beneath the button (or leave the box in its default checked state to see the suggested changes in the context of your original sentence).
You can benefit from our full-sentence suggestions when writing across your favorite websites. No more second-guessing whether your work emails and documents make sense to your reader. With our new and improved Grammarly browser extension, you can communicate clearly with ease.
Enhance your fluency
This category helps those who are looking to improve their writing skill level in English. These suggestions include commonly misused words and phrases. To make the most of these features, you can go to your settings at Grammarly input your primary language, and select “I want fluency assistance.”
Reduce wordiness
Are you prone to using five words when two would do? This category will help you refine your writing so you can keep everything concise and clear.
Tone detector
If you’ve ever had a friend look at an email to make sure it wasn’t too harsh (or too nice) before you hit send, then you already know how important it is to convey the right tone in your writing. We spent much of 2019 building Grammarly’s new tone detector to help you feel confident that your tone will come across the way you want it to. By analyzing word choice, phrasing, punctuation, and even capitalization, Grammarly can tell you if your message sounds friendly, confident, concerned, or something else entirely.
Mobile synonyms
Writing on your phone often means writing on the go. It means typing fast, maybe while doing something else at the same time. But it doesn’t mean your writing has to be sloppy—or bland. The Grammarly Keyboard now suggests vivid synonyms for words you type on your phone. To see synonyms for a word, just pause for a moment after you finish typing it. You can also see synonyms for a word you typed previously by moving your cursor into that word.
The Grammarly Editor
Grammarly’s writing suggestions encompass a lot more than grammar. This year we updated the look and feel of the Grammarly Editor to help you ensure that your work isn’t just mistake-free, but also clear, engaging, and tailored to your audience and goals.
Consistency
If OK and okay are both acceptable spellings, does it really matter if you use both variants in the same document? Switching back and forth may not be an error, exactly, but it can come across as a bit sloppy to readers. Consistency makes your document look more polished and professional. This year we added consistency suggestions to Grammarly Premium to help catch inconsistent spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, and more.
Plagiarism Checker
Grammarly’s plagiarism checker can detect plagiarism from billions of web pages as well as from ProQuest’s academic databases. Plagiarism check will tell you whether or not, your text contains duplicate content. Premium plagiarism check highlights passages that require citations and gives you the resources you need to properly credit your sources.
Pricing
Conclusion
In my opinion it's a best tool to have for your writing, if English is not your first language. Free version is sufficient for beginner level writers like me. But if writing is your source of earning you must think of Premium plan.
Who can use it?
Authors
Bloggers
Students
Business professionals
Freelance writers and content marketers