Grammarly Review
***See the “What I Liked” section below for the February 2015 Google Chrome Extension for Grammarly Update***
Click here for Grammarly. Here is my Grammarly Review. If you’re looking for the official Grammarly site, please click the link below:
The first time I heard of Grammarly, I was intrigued.
After all, I’m a Blogger, like most of you reading this, and I think that we all could do with as much help as possible to get our articles written correctly using proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
However, my first thought was, “Why would I even need Grammarly, since I already have Microsoft Word?”.
Obviously, this popular piece of software enables me to check all my work for spelling and grammar errors. In any event, surely it does not matter much if the articles on my website have some grammar and spelling mistakes, right?
Well, not according to a video I had recently watched by Matt Cutts, the software engineer who is head of Google’s Webspam team.
In it, he said that there’s a correlation between the Page Rank of your site and how grammatically correct your blog posts are. The lower Page Rank sites tend not “to spell” as well as the higher Page Rank sites.
It does make sense, especially in the current post-Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird algorithm updates environment. It’s all about “user experience” in Google’s eyes now.
Thus, an article that flows more naturally, with correctly spelled words and correct grammar, is much more beneficial for a person who is using Google to resolve their queries.
In fact, Cutts recently gave the low-down that “factual accuracy, spelling, and stylistic elements” are one of the twenty-three listed components that were targeted in the Panda update.
We can reasonably assume from this statement that Google may have penalized Webmasters for not editing their blogs carefully to cut out bad grammar, spelling, and overall sloppy work.
So, taking into consideration the Google ranking pointers above, the purpose of this article is to find out whether Grammarly can make a difference when it comes to editing your blog posts prior to publishing them.
Furthermore, is it worth the cost to purchase it? Anyway, here’s my Grammarly review:
Grammarly Review – What is it?
Grammarly, as its name suggests, is an online grammar corrector. But it’s not just for correcting the grammar in your articles; it’s also a spelling and plagiarism checker, not to mention a “context-optimized” synonym generator.
You can see all of it’s available features down the left-hand sidebar that appears when you import an article for editing, as in the image here:
Grammarly Features
Grammarly Review – What I Liked
***February 2015 Update. Grammarly Introduces Free Google Chrome Extension***
The introduction this month of Grammarly’s free Google Chrome extension has been met with high enthusiasm by Writers, Editors, Publishers, Educators (and anyone else in need of an excellent grammar and spelling corrector) worldwide.
It’s now possible to set up a free account and correct your online documents on the fly before finalizing or publishing them.
All you need to do is click here to set up your Grammarly account and you’ll be prompted within Grammarly to install the Google Chrome extension.
I’ve already done so and while writing this article inside WordPress, I saw the little green Grammarly icon at the end of the post that told me I had some mistakes to correct; 18 advanced issues and 7 critical issues, lol!
Needless to say, I went ahead and made the corrections. 🙂 And MS Word never mentioned them!
Anyway, moving on, what I like about Grammarly is that it is more than just a tool for correcting grammar and spelling errors.
The creators of this program have included features that I would never have even thought of- to help writers and bloggers cover every aspect of perfecting their use of the English language.
For example, the “style” feature will catch instances in your article of over-use of a particular word.
Not only that, but also it will immediately give you an excellent alternative synonym of that word that’s based on the context of your article:
Grammarly Example
The common thing about these exceptional unique features, like “sentence structure,” “contextual spelling” and “vocabulary use” is that the user always gets a very detailed explanation of, for example, what’s wrong with their sentence structure.
The software also shows a precise breakdown on how to make the correction properly, with two examples thrown in; one showing improper use, and the other demonstrating the correct usage to make sure they understand why the correction was necessary.
You can see how these features work in the video that follows. In it, I review an existing article on rightblogtips.com using both Microsoft Word and Grammarly to see whether there are any differences in how these programs suggest the corrections that need to be made:
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By the way, if you’re worried that you’ll have to give up using Microsoft Word to gain all the benefits of Grammarly, don’t worry; there’s a free plugin for Microsoft Office apps, so you can use Grammarly within Word as well as your Outlook email account.
What I also liked is the online guide that helps explain how to get the best use out of Grammarly. In addition, you can even send your finished article from within Grammarly to a professional proofreader for further review.
I’d say college and grad students must use this feature a LOT to help get better grades on their essays and theses! 🙂
The icing on the cake is that they have an online community and Facebook page where writers can convene, help each other out and exchange ideas.
As of the time of writing this post, their Facebook page has 1,191,655 likes! That alone will tell you that this is no shabby software product.
In fact, right now there are 350,551 Facebook fans “talking about this”. That’s an engagement level of 29.42%!
That’s an unusually high number, and it just goes to show that an incredible amount of users are currently communicating with each other about something to do with Grammarly.
Lastly, once you’re finished with your article, you can turn on the plagiarism checker feature. Doing so will ensure that you do not have any sentences or paragraphs within your article that already exist on the web.
You should especially use this component if someone else wrote some, or all, of the article for you. You certainly do not want to be penalized by Google for duplicate content, so it’s handy to have this available.
Grammarly Review – What I Didn’t Like
The only thing that I wasn’t keen on about Grammarly was the price. At $37.95 per month, it’s certainly not cheap.
Nevertheless, there are also quarterly and annual subscriptions available at discounted prices, which makes it more affordable at the equivalent of $24.98 and $14.58 per month, respectively.
However, when I thought about it, I realized that all premium writing products come at a cost. After all, how much was it to buy Microsoft Office to be able to access MS Word?
I’m quite sure it cost more, although it was a one-time charge. I felt that if I could just get some form of discount, I would be 100% satisfied with buying Grammarly.
So I reached out to Liliya in Grammarly’s marketing department. I told her about my little issue, and I was delighted to find out that they are currently offering a 20% discount!
Not only that, Liliya offered me an additional 10% discount for a total of 30% off-now that’s a real bargain! So now the best savings offer, the annual plan, is down to $10.21 per month, which is a lot more manageable.
When I mentioned my site to her, she said that all visitors to Right Blog Tips can get the same 30% discount!!
So if you’re interested, click here for your Right Blog Tips Visitors discount. Needless to say, I can no longer think of anything that I do not like about Grammarly, LOL! 🙂
Grammarly Review – Overall Thoughts
Grammarly, as you can see from the points outlined above, is an all-round editing program for serious bloggers and writers who want to create quality articles and blog posts for their audience that are as grammatically correct as possible.
However, it’s not just for professional writers and bloggers, as highlighted by the six different “document types” that you can select before you begin editing: namely, academic, business, technical, medical, creative and casual.
Thus, personnel in all sorts of fields, like the legal, healthcare, journalism, educational and marketing professions, to name but a few can seriously benefit from this effective grammar corrector.
Last of all, one large segment of the global population that may want to review and consider getting Grammarly is the non-native english language speaking bloggers who write articles in English to appeal to consumers in the massive US, Canadian, UK and Australian markets.
If your article is difficult to read or only make sense here and there, then the likelihood of that visitor leaving your site is very high.
You’ll probably not even realize that your article was not very understandable, because your word processor more than likely missed several instances of bad grammar, punctuation or sentence structure.
Using Grammarly, not only will you see exactly where you’ve made mistakes, but also you’ll learn WHY your grammar was incorrect.
If you follow the explanations and the ensuing examples that they give you right there inside your article, then you can be sure that you’ll be on the right path to delivering a polished, near-perfect article that’s a pleasure to read.
To conclude, it has been my experience that Microsoft Word and other word processor programs only detect a fraction of the grammar, styling and sentence structure mistakes that are caught using Grammarly.
Thus, I highly recommend it for anyone who is sincere about providing exceptionally high quality content for their readers. Google will love you for it too! 🙂
Just as a reminder, to make sure you don’t miss out, you can use this coupon to get 30% off Grammarly for Right Blog Tips readers only.
Over to You
So are you as good a writer as you think you are? I certainly wasn’t, LOL!
What else can you do to improve the quality of your articles? I have a lot of work to do with mine!
Do you think Google favors sites that contain articles with excellent grammar and spelling? Will those sites with poorly written blog posts suffer in a future algorithm update by Google?
Let me know in the comments section. I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post. Happy editing! 🙂
