Can Grammarly Improve My Writing

[Rosette Allaband]

Weall need to improve our writing craft and working with a professional editor is the best way to do that. But there are ways to improve your writing before you submit to an editor (or an agent or a publisher), and writing software, ProWritingAid, can help you do that.

[Please note, I am an affiliate of both ProWritingAid and Grammarly, which means if you use my link, I will receive a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. I only recommend tools I personally use and think are great for authors.]

I found this interesting, because I use Autocrit and Grammarly. Grammarly is always trying to remove commas between clauses, and it looks as though Pro Writing Aid is bent on adding them. So I will definitely try it out.

Thanks!

Dear Joanna

Message from Australia

Thank you so much for the fabulous post related to Prowriter.

And- I found the video very helpful.

I do appreciate your posts and follow you on podcasts, blog and Facebook.

I am learning to improve my writing through you.

Thank you.

Regards Cally

Dear Joanna, I appreciate this free ProWritingAide tutorial. Sometimes I feel that people like me who have books to be written or they will burn a hole in their gut unless we have loads of money are pretty much on our own since most editors and or publishers are either expensive or inaccessible for first-time authors. I am about to publish my second book, which is in part a revision of my first book that was published incomplete and with errors. So, I am learning how to use ProWritingAid and you just finished showing me all the great things I can do with it. I hope you consider doing a tutorial on Scrivener, the ones I have seen are confusing or expensive. Also, another on how to get a good publisher on a tight budget.

I know, the moment you think of using Gramamrly as an aid in your scholarly writing, the question automatically pops up in your head: Is it professionally acceptable to use Grammarly? This happens also because most of us think of writing as an extremely individual and personal process, and even thinking of employing a technological writing aid, like using Gramamrly, comes across as something unprofessional. But think of it this way: No single work of scholarship is ever published without an editorial process. If you have read my article on Scholarly Publishing, you already know that not only is proper usage and grammar crucial to the ealry stages of writing, it is exceedingly important in producing the final product. We never seem to have a problem with someone else copyediting our scholarly work. I mean, we are appalled if a journal or a book publisher does not send our manuscript to a professional copyeditor, for it is only after we have accepted or rejected the changes suggested by the copyeditor that we feel that the manuscript is ready for typesetting. Then, even before the final printing, we always diligently proofread our work and get someone else (in my case my lovely wife) to proofread it too. All of these finishing touches prove that a finalized piece of scholarly work only becomes better with professional editorial help, and that writing and publishing is never really an isolated, individual effort.

If we are okay with accepting help from professional copyeditors and from our friends, then using Gramamrly is juts another source for editorial help and we should have no qualms about using it. After all, most of us already rely on the spell and grammar check offered by the word processing programs that we use.

The short answer is NO. Using Gramamrly can enhance the clarity of your writing and enable you to use language and grammar more precisely, but Gramamrly cannot WRITE for you: That you will have to do yourself. In fact, there is no software that can in any way replicate the rich diversity and complexity of a human mind and since scholarly writing is so much about the granular understanding of your field, no software can help you come up with original ideas or automate the compositional or organizational aspects of your essay. Using Gramamrly, however, can enable you to make better word choices, correct common grammar errors, and even perform contextual changes for clarity and variety as you write. In this sense then, using Gramamrly along with your own writing and thinking skills will add an extra layer of editorial and stylistic help to your writing, and that, in my opinion, can be exceptionally useful for scholars, especially those like me for whom English is not our native language.

Quite a few universities are now using Gramamrly as a tool in their writing composition classes. The students, in the process of using the software, also learn how to understand the Grammarly editorial suggestions within the context of their own writing. Quite a few professors also use Grammarly as a tool to check for plagiarism and the writers themselves can use it to check their own work to avoid any unintentional plagiarism. In fact, quite a few teachers find the software quite useful not only for its utility for their computer savvy students but also as a pedagogical tool in teaching grammar and style differently to a generation of students whose entire learning career revolves around using digital technologies. Thus, Gramamrly can also be used quite effectively as a wonderful teaching tool!

As I said above, while Garamamrly absolutely cannot write for you, I would not recommend it if the developers made any such claims, using Grammarly, however, can certainly help you getting your style and grammar right. And if you know anything about scholarly writing and publishing, especially as postcolonial literature scholars who might not be native English speakers, any help with issues of style and grammar is certainly likely to improve the quality of your writing! please feel free to share your own views or experiences of using Gramamrly in the comment section below.

Dr. Asif:

Yes, I think we should not hesitate to use any aids for editing our writing, especially if the software explains the suggested changes and lets us decide whether or not we accept the suggested changes.

I rely on all available resources to edit my work.

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Grammarly, in essence, is an AI-powered grammar and spell-check app that actually goes beyond simply checking grammar and spelling. It helps you write clean, concise, and error-free copy, while offering helpful suggestions to take your writing to the next level and effectively get your message across.

The Hemingway App, on the other hand, is an editor that highlights problematic areas in your writing and offers suggestions to help you improve grammar, fluency, sentence structure, and readability. Basically, it just makes your writing look and read better.

With a browser extension, desktop apps, and integrations within popular platforms, it seamlessly improves your writing wherever you work. Add it to Chrome (it also works on Safari, Firefox, and Explorer), and you can use Grammarly in your email, social media, and Google Docs, you name it.

I can't think of a good reason why anyone shouldn't at least have the free version of Grammarly installed. It's SO incredibly helpful. And if you upgrade? It's even more useful. Here's a free month of Grammarly premium on us.

Grammarly detects a wide spectrum of errors including subject-verb agreement, incorrect pronoun usage, misplaced modifiers, faulty parallel structure, typos, missing commas, and much more. So it goes beyond basic spelling and grammar.

Errors are typically underlined with colored hints (red for grammar, blue for punctuation). Clicking on the error gives you an explanation and suggests a correction. You can choose to accept or decline the suggestion.

Benefits for freelancers: Reduces proofreading time, helps catch subtle errors that you may miss on the first read, and ensures professionalism in emails, social media posts, and general communication.

I highlighted the word indicators, and you can see the little GO tool pops up. The pencil icon will re-write it automatically, and you can refine it from there. The lightbulb icon brings up a pop-up box that asks you what you want to do. Then you talk to it like a chatbot.

Since its 2009 inception, cloud-based Grammarly has grown to more than 15 million daily active users and is often one of the top-ranked grammar checkers. Users can download the Grammarly Keyboard for their mobile devices, add an extension to Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge, use the Grammarly Desktop App or download a plug-in for Microsoft Office so the algorithm can spell and grammar check on Word, social media and Outlook. Grammarly switched from a subscription-only model to a freemium model in 2015 to provide more access to users.

The feedback the system gets through humans when they ignore a proposed suggestion helps the system get smarter and provides the human linguists working with the input of the machine on how to make the system better. The more text it is exposed to, the better it can make appropriate suggestions. That's one of the reasons the company switched in 2010 to a consumer service from targeting enterprise customers so it would have access to a larger data set and a more significant opportunity.

In 2017, investors General Catalyst, IVP and Spark Capital committed $110 million to the already profitable company to help it further enhance its capabilities. Although the company has made great strides in improving grammar, grammatically correct writing doesn't necessarily mean it is compelling or concise. So, although the company has a history of adding new checks such as to identify vagueness or plagiarism to improve your writing, expect this new infusion of funds to allow the company to add staff in an effort to continue improvements to its algorithm and the editing it can do. It has adequately tackled the basic mechanics of writing from spelling, grammar, and sentence structure as well as being able to help with clarity and readability of text. The next frontier is to provide context-specific suggestions.

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