I tried Grammarly and like it a lot

Software
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I published two posts on my personal blog yesterday and noticed copyediting errors after publication. This troubled me partly because I had a whitepaper due later that day, and I was concerned about sloppy mistakes in paying copy.

So I decided, “I’ve heard good things about Grammarly. I’ll give that a try.”

Holy cow! It’s fantastic!

Also, humbling.

Grammarly flagged 95 suggestions in a 2,200-word whitepaper. It suggested replacing the first three words of the whitepaper with a single word. Most of the changes it recommended were along those lines; tightening up the text by eliminating unnecessary words.

However, some of Grammarly’s recommended changes would have introduced errors in my work, and I had to dismiss those. Grammarly doesn’t run on autopilot.

Overall, I’m delighted with Grammarly, and I’m signing up for a one-year subscription now.

And yes, Grammarly reviewed this post. It recommended seven changes. I accepted most of them.

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I’ve been using it for a couple years now. It’s generally very good, but the best part for me is the system-wide integration. I really liked WordRake, but it’s just for Word and Outlook. ProWritingAid is pretty good, but you have to open documents in that app rather than the one you’re working in.

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I really like it, but I just find it way too expensive to justify.

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As ChatGPT moves into commercial products, this kind of app has a potential to massively improve.

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There is a free version which is pretty terrific. someone in Mac Power Users talk told me about it!

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I often write blog posts in Ulysses which recently gained the same kind of feature, built in.

I’ve used it for anything I care about (short stuff that’s mostly technical, I tend not to bother) and have got used to the things it misunderstands. I do think it has improved everything I’ve used it on markedly.

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I’ve tried Grammarly a couple of times and really don’t like it much. Aside from it catching my continual misuse of “it’s” and “its” a lot of its suggestions weren’t really improvements. Yes, it’ll highlight words it considers to be ‘unnecessary’ but concision isn’t always the goal and losing words can damage emphasis and tone leading to text with a diminished voice, impact, and nuance.

Honestly, I’ve found that being more disciplined with proof reading results in much higher quality text than just using Grammarly to sterilise it and catch lazy errors.

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I wish there could be an option to use it in Spanish.

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You can give LanguageTool a try. I really like how it works and performs. They offer multiple languages including Spanish. It’s also embedded in Ulysses in Revision.

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