Testing Grammarly
Wednesday, July 13, 2011

I’m testing an Internet service called Grammarly. You copy-paste your text into a box and then presses a button to analyze it. The final result is presented as specific suggestions as well as a bar graded from zero to hundred, going from red to green.

There are options for what kind of style you have on the text. If “business” is selected “I’m” is marked out and suggested being changed to “I am”, but not so on the “casual” setting.

What I’ve found most useful were the suggestions made for changing words like “very” and "good" to something more colorful and distinct.

I’ve also become highly aware that you can’t rely on Grammarly to take care of my sloppy texts. I skip words sometimes – almost impossible for a computer to detect. The comma suggestions are of course based on grammatical rules and calculated based on how my sentence is likely built, but in most cases I have not agreed. Maybe I’m wrong, but at least I feel comfortable with where I have placed my commas.

Its suggestions for general synonyms are better not touched at all. How even a computer can think that the word “character” could be replaced by “bottle” goes beyond me. Many people surely would like a word like “wish” to be synonym with “choose” but, unfortunately, that is not the case.

This service costs money. Not a vast amount, but still, I must decide if I should pay or not.

During these days, I have tested almost every single text I’ve written in English. If nothing else, I must say that the service gives me comfort. I still need to double check my texts, but it’s like someone else having had a peek at it too before published, and it is good to hold mommy in her hand when crossing a street.