If you’re a writer or blogger who writes content to make a living, you’ll know that you can’t afford to make any mistakes in your writing.

Spelling or grammar errors can be very embarrassing and quickly get people to judge you as a writer, especially if you do copywriting for company profiles, voice-over scripts & blogs.

Lucky for content writers, writing tools like Microsoft Word & Google Chrome often have an autocorrect system to correct your spelling mistakes.

However, these autocorrect systems does not do so well when it comes to correcting grammatical errors, plagiarism, vocabulary use, and context.

In this post, I’d like to introduce you to Grammarly. While I don’t rate myself as a bad English writer and actually write pretty well, Grammarly has brilliantly corrected my writing I’ve otherwise would have missed. With Grammarly, I now can be assured that my clients won’t find embarrassing grammar errors in my copywriting.

How Grammarly Works In Helping You Be A Better Writer

Grammarly is a SaaS (Software as a service) that works as an extension in Google Chrome. Once you add it to Chrome, everything you write on your browser will be checked & proofread by Grammarly in real-time.

You can also write or upload a document on Grammarly’s platform and have your writing checked.

If you prefer to write in Word, there’s also a paid option to use Grammarly as a plugin in Microsoft Word.

1 – Write Better Blogs & Content

I usually write on WordPress based blogs, using Google Chrome as my browser. With Grammarly as an extension, it automatically scans my writing as I write.

I quickly realized that I have a habit of leaving out commas and having redundant works  in my writing. When I was writing this post, I intently created a few typos, just to see if Grammarly is able to check them. See the image below:

2 – No More Embarrassing Facebook Updates

Have you seen posts like this or have been guilty yourself of committing such a blunder?

Because Grammarly runs on your Google Chrome, as long as you use Chrome as your browser, everything you type or write, whether in your email, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, etc., will be proofread by Grammarly.

Even the best writers in the world make mistakes. Having a tool like Grammarly will save you some embarrassing moments.

3 – Check Definitions & Synonym of Words

Have you ever come across some words you don’t know on the internet? With Grammarly in my browser, I now simply double click on ANY text in my browser and immediately get a definition of that particular word.

Earlier, I was reading an article on the internet and didn’t know the word ‘morose’. Double clicking the word enabled me to quickly see the meaning of the word ‘morose’ and get on my with reading. Check out the screenshot below.

I didn’t know what morose meant. Well, sue me!

As a content marketer myself, I write content and ad copy nearly every day. This is where I found Grammarly’s synonym function to be really useful.

What’s another word for ‘buy’? Or another word for ‘use’?

I also found myself trying different synonyms when doing keyword research for a content marketing project. The added convenience of having a quick dictionary/synonym-finder at my fingertips simply made me more productive.

There are probably many more reasons why I think you’ll be better off with Grammarly installed in your browser than going without it. In fact, I can’t think of a reason not to have Grammarly in your browser. It’s free anyway.

Get Grammarly on your browser for free here

Grammarly Premium – When You Need The Extra Features

I’d be first to say that Grammarly Premium isn’t exactly cheap, especially if you’re bootstrapping cash as a beginner writer or startup. Grammarly is priced at $29.95/month and at $11.66/month if you choose to pay annually.

So what do you get when you decide to pay $29.95 a month?

With a premium plan, you’ll get:

• 100+ additional grammar & spelling checks
• Vocabulary enhancement suggestions
• Genre-specific writing style checks
• Plagiarism detector
• Microsoft Word plugin
• Native desktop writing apps

Basically, you get an even robust grammar checker that checks your writing deeper.

The addition of an integration plugin that enables you to use Grammarly in Microsoft Word is nice if you primarily use Word to write and create documents, but note that the integration only works on Word on Windows computers. Mac users will have to wait for the next development.

Should you get a premium plan?

Well, it depends on where you are a full-time writer or is someone who is serious about writing. I reckon $29.95/mth is a sane investment, assuming you work alone and do not have a proofreader to check your work.

Perhaps you’re an academic student or teacher who’d like the addition of a pair of digital eyes checking on your work. If that is so, $29.95/mth is a sane investment, assuming you work alone and do not have a proofreader to check your work.

Cons of Grammarly – Where It Falls Short

While Grammarly acts as a digital proofreader for all your writing, it doesn’t replace a real human proofreader.

First, you’ll need an internet connection for Grammarly to work. Grammarly works by checking word definitions and grammar errors on their server, so you’ll need a working internet connection.

Second, it sometimes confuse correctly written English and suggests that you change them. You’ll have to evaluate the corrections suggested by Grammarly because hastily correcting them

Thirdly, the offline plugin does not work with Word for Mac. Anyway, it’s only a matter of time before the team at Grammarly implements an integration with Word for Mac, looking at how aggressively they have been doing push marketing.

All In A Nutshell

At first, I was skeptical about using Grammarly in my browser. Some of my thoughts were like, what if slows down my browser? What if my internet speed suffers from its on-going grammar checks?

However, my experience my Grammarly has been more positive than negative and I’m considering going for a premium plan soon.

p.s. I made over 20+ corrections with Grammarly on this post. Shows how much I need to improve my writing!