In this Grammarly review we answer the question: is it worth it?
Firstly – why should you listen to what I have to say about Grammarly? Well, I have been a proofreader and editor for over 10 years at London Proofreaders. Thus, I have a lot of experience when it comes to writing and grammar checking software plus a great knowledge of English grammar.
Why is my knowledge of grammar important? Well it means I know if Grammarly is making correct grammatical changes or not!
For me Grammarly free version is the next (and very big) step up from Microsoft Word’s spell checker.
In this review I will look at both the Grammarly free version and the paid version, Grammarly Premium, looking at the pros and cons of each.
Grammarly Free version
PROS
Explains grammar rules –
When Grammarly finds an error you can click on the suggestion and find out WHY what you have written is wrong, as it gives you example sentences and explains the rules. In this way you will learn correct grammar and help improve your writing by AVOIDING making the mistake as you learn from your mistakes.
Much, much better than the Editor function built in to Word
Grammarly Free version is about ten times better than Word’s “Editor” feature that checks spelling and grammar. So even just from that perspective it is worth downloading!
Customisation –
You can choose several settings to fit the style of document your are running Grammarly on. This helps
Adding ignore words to your personal dictionary –
You can add words to the dictionary and Grammarly will then ignore them and not consider them an error. This means you don’t have to reject the suggestion tens or even hundreds of times in a document. Especially useful for academic documents with common and recurring scientific terminology or with foreign words.
CONS
False positives –
Grammarly does make mistakes. Take this example:
rock and roll is famous around the world for being an energetic style of music.
Grammarly will mark the ‘is’ as being incorrect and suggest ‘are’ – and make the sentence “rock and roll are famous around the world…”
Does not check consistency –
If you spell ‘France’ in one place in lowercase, ‘france’, and you correct it, it WILL NOT change all instances of ‘france’ to ‘France’ throughout your document.
Does not check logic –
You may mention that someone has blonde hair in one paragraph and brown hair in the next.
Not great with technical writing –
If you use Grammarly to check technical documents, for example a scientific article, it will consider all the scientific names incorrect and highlight them with a red underline. This will make it harder to see the real errors you have made in the document and make it the software less efficient.
Final verdict about Grammarly Free version:
Overall, Grammarly free version is like a much, much better Microsoft Word spell checker – but on steroids. However, there are many limitations with the free version, so we strongly advise you to invest in the premium version.
Grammarly Premium version
PROS
CONS
