In this Grammarly review post, I’ll offer an in-depth analysis of the tool. I’m also going to help you whether you need to go for this tool or not, along with a 15% discount on the tool.
Grammarly is the most popular Grammar checker software out there. You might have already used their free browser extension for fixing typos and other grammatical errors.
It also has a premium version, which unlocks many more features. You may be in a dilemma whether the money you spend monthly on getting the premium version is worth it or not when compared to the free version.
By the end of this in-depth review, I’m pretty sure you get an idea about what this tool can do for you.
Why am I the right guy to review Grammarly? Well, being a blogger from 2012, I’m using this tool since 2014. Earlier in 2017, I decided to try out the premium version of this tool. I have used the tool in and out, and explored all the features offered by it.
Note: If you are on this post to claim the 15% discount on Grammarly Premium, click here to apply the discount.
This is a pretty long review. So in order to easily browse through the article make use of the below table of content.
SECTION 1
Grammarly Review – How to use it?
Grammarly can be used in your Browser, MS Word, your Macbook, etc.
Let us discuss this in detail.
Grammarly browser extension
As you may already know, Grammarly comes with a free Chrome extension.
For installing it, you just need to head over to their extension page here. After that, you’ll be presented something like the below screenshot.
Here you need to click on – “Add to Chrome” button. Once you click on it, it’ll take you to the plugin installation page.
After the installation of the tool, you can set your preferred settings for the extension. With this extension, in case I want a perfect substitute for a word in my content, I can just double-click on the word and pick any synonyms or substitutes that Grammarly recommends.
The Grammarly extension will check for the grammatical errors wherever you type on the web like Gmail, Facebook post, WordPress Post Editor, etc.
Above is a little example of how Grammarly integrates with your browser for correcting the Grammatical errors wherever you type.
Grammarly online app
In case if you wish to use the Grammarly app, you can create a new document in their online app and start writing the article.
For using this, first you need to sign up and sign in for free Grammarly version. There go to their app, and click to create a new document. Alternatively, you can also upload a document file to let the Grammarly check for grammatical errors.
After creating a document you can write the content in the document as shown below.
With their online app, you have full control on what kind of errors you want Grammarly to check. For example, by using the toggles at the left-hand side, you can set the contextual spelling checker off.
You can also select what type of document you are writing (refer the above screenshot). With this, Grammarly tends to give you a topic and context-specific grammar suggestions, which is a quite great feature when compared to other grammar checkers.
After writing the document in the online editor, you can save the document to be stored in their cloud servers or even download the document to your PC.
Grammarly addon for microsoft products
In case you wish to write your article in Word or send an email in Outlook, then Grammarly has a free Office add-on. You just need to download the addon by clicking on the download button.
After the download, just install the add-on to your computer. Once the installation is complete you need to enter your Grammarly login info. Now, you can open Microsoft Word or Outlook and use the addon added to the software.
In the above screenshot, I’m using Office 2007. The addon should also work in newer versions of Office.
You also need to note that the Grammarly addon is not there for Mac version of MS Office. Instead, there’s a separate native Grammarly app for Mac users, which I’ve reviewed below.
Grammarly Mac app
For my article writing, I personally use this app for checking my Grammar.
The interface of the Grammarly Mac app is pretty similar to the web version of their app. Except that this app is standalone and requires no web browser. You just can write the article here, and Grammarly dynamically checks your content for any grammatical and style mistakes.
Having a standalone Mac app is just more convenient than using the web version of Grammarly if you are on Mac.
SECTION 2
Grammarly premium review – is it worth the price?
Is premium version really worth the upgrade?
Seeing the effectiveness of the free version of Grammarly, I decided to stick to the free version of the tool last year.
However, this year I decided to try out the premium version and wondered at how many errors the Grammarly premium identified which the free version was not detecting.
As you can see clearly the premium version is much better at catching out more errors in the sentences than the limited free plan.
In the next section let us look at what are all the types of errors that Grammarly catches and some premium features.
What errors does Grammarly catch?
Here are some of the things that Grammarly helped me catch in most of my cases.
Some aspects in which Grammarly helped me.
- Repeated use of passive voice
- Confused prepositions
- Confusion between US and UK spellings. (I’m an Indian)
- Repetition of certain sentences and phrases
- Missing commas
- Much more
The premium version of Grammarly checks for 100+ additional types of errors which the free version can’t.
It’s impossible for me to present all the kinds of errors that Grammarly detects.
Still.
Here are some more types of errors Grammarly catches.
- Incorrect verb tense
- Missing comma after introductory clause
- Comma splice – Solves the confusion between using a comma or a semicolon for separating clauses
- Faulty parallelism – choosing the correct verb form to match the other one
- Incorrect adverb placement – solves the error where the position of adverbs and verbs are interchanged or improper
- Colloquial verb phrase
- Double-subject – the redundant reference to a subject two times in a sentence.
- 100+ more errors
These are some of the grammar and sentence structure errors, which the Grammarly is really good at detecting.
Other features of Grammarly premium
Apart from these Grammar checker features, the Grammarly premium also offers you various other features. I’ll review them one-by-one below.
Plagiarism checker: The Grammarly also comes with an inbuilt plagiarism checker that checks your content across the content around the web for any plagiarism.
The best part is that the Grammarly reports the amount of non-unique sentences or paragraphs in your article.
As you can see in the above screenshot, the Grammarly tool is telling me that I’ve copied an article sentence from an external source.
This is very helpful in knowing whether your freelancer is copying content from elsewhere (even some sentences).
Vocabulary enhancement: In case if you end up using the same word again and again in the article, Grammarly suggests you to use a better (maybe strong) alternative to the word.
As you can see in the above screenshot, the feature can be enabled or disabled on the left sidebar.
A detailed report of the content: The Grammarly also provides you with a detailed report of the article. Refer the below screenshot.
The below article scored 75 out of 100. As you correct errors and make your article great your score will be higher.
Here’s the sample report that the Grammarly presents you to download – Download report.
Some technologies used by Grammarly
Machine learning: According to a blog entry published on Grammarly Tech blog, the tool makes use of machine learning to make its artificial intelligence self-learning. Meaning, as more and more people use Grammarly, the tool becomes better and better.
So, it is no wonder that the large user base of Grammarly is one of the greatest reasons for the accuracy of grammar checking in Grammarly.
Natural language processing: NLP is a technology by which the machines will be able to understand the natural language used by people.
Contextual or semantic analysis: This technology helps Grammarly to correct the context specific typos. Analyze the below screenshot.
In the above screenshot, you can notice the simple example of Grammarly’s contextual spell checking feature in action. It predicts the misspelled word based on the words before it. This is something that MS Word’s grammar checker and other grammar tools don’t have.
Grammarly is using the technologies that Google is using, when it comes to machine learning and data science to make the best use of the data it has collected from the user base.
Based on the technologies used by Grammarly, I can say that Grammarly would continue to be the best grammar checker in the future.
Grammarly pricing and exclusive discount
The premium version of Grammarly costs you as below.
Wait. Here’s the good news.
But for the readers of our blog, we offer a special discount of 15%.
After the discount, the prices will be as below. That’s flat 15% off on all the plans.
Akshay strongly recommends: Grammarly Discount: Readers’ Exclusive Discount (Special)
Editor’s note
I’ve been using this tool for a long time. Needless to say, Grammarly has enabled me to detect the grammatical errors that would be difficult for me to spot. It even detects the incorrect spacing errors.
In the initial days of my blogging career, I was using MS Word’s inbuilt grammar checker to correct my articles.
Guess what? The Word’s inbuilt Grammar checker is dumb and can’t offer suggestions based on the context. It also has limited functionalities.
If you are a serious writer, blogger or a student, getting your hands on this awesome tool helps you a lot in improving your writing style. By consciously coming across the same mistakes again and again reported by Grammarly, you’ll definitely improve your grammar and writing style.
Warning: As with any automated tools, Grammarly can’t be a complete substitute for your proofreading process. But definitely spots out more errors and also saves a lot of time auto correcting the errors on a single click.