I first heard about Grammarly from the CEO of my former company. This company used the G Suite (Gmail, Google Documents) from Google. Excellent spelling and grammar do not come naturally to me. I had come to rely on the advanced features in the Office 365 Suite (Word and Outlook) to assist me with correcting my mistakes. After using G Suite for about a week, I was very concerned that my business communication would not be perceived as professional.
Grammarly is a online service and can also plug into popular browsers such as Microsoft Edge and Chrome. In addition, there is a plug-in Microsoft Word. The free version is good, but I would recommend the paid version for bloggers, writers, executives, and anybody who writes for large audiences.
This summer I left the company using the G Suite and went back to using Microsoft Word. That also meant I stopped using Grammarly. Recently I had the opportunity to put Grammarly to the test. I used portions of a blog article I had written called The Reference Selling Model as a writing sample for a job interview. I edited the blog article in Word (Version 1910 from Office 365) and also decided to cut and paste the final writing sample into Grammarly. I was shocked by the results! This was because my blog articles had been edited by either a paid editor or my wife.
After fixing the mistakes found by Grammarly that were missed by my paid editors and Microsoft Word I decided to test another article. This article is entitled Hiring vs. Onboarding, Which is More Important?
Below is a screenshot from Grammarly.
Grammarly free showed that it found 11 errors. After careful inspection, I agreed that five errors needed to be corrected. First Grammarly found a duplicated word. Second, I incorrectly used the preposition "a" where I should have used "of". Third, there was a sentence that could have been shortened to improve clarity. Forth Grammarly pointed out where I needed a hyphen. Finally, Grammarly found a place I needed a comma.
I am now a huge proponent of Grammarly and plan to purchase the premium service.
Compared with the cost of a paid editor, $140 per year for Grammarly premium seems like a fair price. The company also offers an enterprise version for companies. I was shocked to find out that Grammarly free was better in many respects than a paid editor. Grammarly premium found a few issues with punctuation in compound/complex sentences, several misuses of passive voice, hard to reach text, poor word choices and inappropriate use of colloquialism.
