YGrammarly Premium
As you know, we authors at WA can use the online writing tool called 'Grammarly' to help us get our posts and web pages written as best as we can.
It is a desktop browser extension plug-in and is activated by signing-up with an email address.
There is nothing worse for visitors to our web pages than to find basic spelling, grammatical errors and inconsistencies all over the place.
The Grammarly editor comes as a free or paid version. The former lacks certain features that can only be used in the latter. Examples are thorough editing tools, plagiarism checking, and proofreading.
The free version highlights the main problems in your writing and will help to fix them. It will not help with the other problems.
One of my current aches these days is in my excessive use of the 'passive voice', which the Grammarly browser plug-in is seemingly forever highlighting.
Another one is my use of sentences containing twenty words or more, as highlighted by the Yoast WordPress plug-in.
To my relief, I found that the Grammarly tool doesn't complain about the use of twenty and more words per sentence! Good. So from now on I won't be concerned about that issue. I trust Grammarly more than the Yoast plug-in.
However, with the free Grammarly tool I get annoyed with all those passive voice things. And I don't want to be accused of plagiarism — especially when writing reviews about affiliate products. Surely that is easily done.
So I purchased one month's premium membership with Grammarly just to find out how good it is.
I use a Chromebook to do my web work these days because of the widespread availability of free WiFi in the UK. It is convenient to type away in Evernote on my smartphone and then download the text to Google Docs on my Chromebook.
Unfortunately, Grammarly doesn't support Google Docs just yet. I think the Grammarly people are working on that. There's no problem with Microsoft Word though.
Anyway, I then edit the text in Google Docs before pasting it into Grammarly. That's when I see all the horrible things I've written ... all highlighted in red and yellow — the seriously at fault parts being in red.
Fixing the serious problems is the same as in the free version. But the tens of passive voice errors are all annoyingly staring me in the face.
The cool thing is that by altering my text to a more punchier 'present tense' alternative, I find that those complaints gradually melt away as I go though the text!
I like it when Grammarly offers alternative words to those I use too often.
I end up with a 100 percent edited document. Cool.
I then turn on the plagiarism checker. Usually there will be part of a sentence being used elsewhere on the web. That, I find, is way be over-the-top.
For instance, I had a sentence about azimuth coordinates containing a phrase used on a medical web page! How irrelevant is that? Anyway, I then just change a word or two in the highlighted so-called plagiarized text, and that fixes it.
So there you are. I like using Grammarly, and after this first rather expensive month as a premium user, I'll save money by going annually. I suppose that applies to WA, too.
Oh, by the way, this post was written using Evernote whilst travelling on a bus between Buxton in Derbyshire to Sheffield in West Yorkshire 30 miles away. Grammarly only supports desktop devices, so this post is written as is. No editing.
I then uploaded this text to WA via my smartphone using my phone network. The bus had no WiFi coverage.
I hope you find this post useful.
Recent Comments
5
Yes I see the "Y." That is the down side of mobile devices. What I see on my tablet is different than on my Laptop, so I have to use both.
Hello Vic, I did find this useful and informative. I do love this age of computerization, desktop, laptops, Chromebooks and smartphones. You literally can work anywhere so long as you have Wifi or mobile network.
Absolutely, Harvey. That is what I like about digital technology. We are no longer confined to wired internet access at home.
Not that long ago we were tied to slow dial-up connections over copper phone lines. Now we have WiFi. I have the feeling that those turning the wheel have something better in the pipeline. I'm amazed at the pace of progress in digital technology since the turn of the century. Optical fiber broadband is next, I think, which should skyrocket internet speeds.
Where there are profits to be made, new technology will usually be rolled out.
I'd like to know where this science and technology is coming from. But I digress.
By the way, the title of my post has no letter 'Y' at the beginning! That appeared because the 'post new blog' on WA is not mobile responsive! I pasted the title via my smartphone, but part of the field was off screen. That letter Y must have been there! So there's a warning.
Maybe one day, WA will make their whole website mobile responsive. Indeed, if you read my post about this issue, you'll understand that Google's onto this.
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Hi Vic, I have been using Grammarly free version for quite sometimes. It is useful but somewhat limited. Understanding you have gone premium. However, I find the premium version rather expensive. Is it really worth upgrading? [Kelsey]
No. I've just pulled the plug. I wanted to find out how good it is. I'll be sticking to the free version until Grammarly can offer suggestions for that pesky so-called passive voice complaint!