When I first decided to be a freelance writer I started looking for tools that would help me and make my work flow easier. Like most writers I am good with pouring out words on a screen but not so good when it came to editing. This can pose a problem in that people can get the wrong idea if your grammar or such is not up to speed.
Also as writers we have to watch out for the ever present threat of plagiarism. While a few do it deliberately most read something then later write it somewhere but forget where they read it. This can be bad if you get caught doing this. So I set out to find a software that helped with:
Spelling
Grammar check
Check for Plagiarism
The people at Grammerly contacted me and asked if I wanted to try out their service. Since I was in the market for such a service I agreed.
On the surface it seemed to have everything I wanted but first I wanted to put it to the test and see how it fared.
The biggest issue would be my grammar. I made many an English teacher weep because I could never get the hang of the proper place for commas and colons and so on. I saw that you could add it has a plug in for Microsoft works but as I use Libre Office with Ubuntu I was unable to test this. I was also sad to see that it had no Libre office plug in. Ubuntu users get left out of everything. So I uploaded my article to its web service and it had a whole list of grammatical errors for me to fix. Like I said I am not very good with that sort of thing, but it seemed to mark as many errors as my former English teachers so I guessed it was doing well. I also liked that it showed you the correct way to use something and explained why it was a mistake. It was like an English teacher was right there with me! Minus the asking if I was so smart how come I couldn’t punctuate. I also got fewer corrections from editors which for some reason makes me happy. I still have this need for a gold star and a Good Job!
It also caught all my spelling mistakes. It was on par with a word processing program so it wasn’t any better or worse on that front. It was nice to have that included. You could also make the program “learn” a word so you wont be correcting the same word a million times.
And the plagiarism part of the software. It did show me a couple places that could have technically be considered plagiarism if you had a really good fact checker. I think this is a good thing as I wont have to worry about legal stuff down the road.
Another future that I liked was that you could install a plug-in for Firefox and chrome and it would check your postings on social media networks. This was one of my favorite futures.
Overall I think this program is worth the 10.00 a month. My only real complaint was that you couldn’t use it on Libre Office. Other than that this is a fantastic program for writers.
