The English language may appear to be the easiest one around, but the truth is that even native speakers often find themselves at a loss for words. Unless you are a teacher of the language, you probably wouldn’t know the difference between a conjunctive adverb and a subordinate conjunction, let alone the fact that you are using them improperly. And without a proper grasp of the rules of English grammar it would be impossible to write sentences that make sense to readers.
If you are someone who spends a lot of time writing content, say a student, blogger, or professor, you may often end up overlooking the most obvious mistakes in your content. After all, its simply too easy to say “its” instead of “It’s” or “your” instead of “you’re”. Then there’s the not-so-obvious “form” instead of “from” and “through” instead of “thorough.” I could go on and on.
If you find yourself in a place where you do a lot of writing, but don’t have the services of a proof reader, you can consider taking the help of various free and paid tools that do the grammar check and other corrections for you. In this post, we take a look at some of the smart tools that are available in the marketplace.
Tools to Grammar Check Your Content
PaperRater
PaperRater is an online tool powered by Ginger software that is completely free to use. Its prominent features include:
- Plagiarism detection
- Writing suggestions
- Spelling & Grammar Check
- Style and Word Choice Analysis
- Readability Statistics
- Title Validation
- Vocabulary Builder tool
- Auto grading
PaperRater also offers a premium service with added benefits such as faster processing, ad-free experience, and a longer maximum paper length (15 pages @ 300 words/page) for $7.95/month (on an annual plan).
The Good: Is straightforward and easy to use. The tool leaves comments and suggestions in the completed report for improvement.
The Bad: If your content it long, it takes longer for the free tool to scan it.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a premium online tool that uses over 250 grammar rules to scan your text and suggest corrections. Its key features include:
- Contextual spell check
- Grammar check
- Punctuation check
- Sentence structure check
- Writing style check
- Vocabulary enhancement
- Plagiarism check
Grammarly integrates with Microsoft Word and Outlook via an easy to use add-in and also has a free Chrome extension that offers limited usage of its core features. Grammarly offers a premium service with plans ranging from $29.95 a month to $11.66 a month on a annual plan.
The Good: The tool is well designed and easy to use. It offers one-click fixes for issues discovered in your content.
The Bad: You need to sign up for the free trial with your credit card or Paypal account.
Ginger
Ginger is a desktop/mobile application that does more than just your English language grammar check. Its key features include:
- Dictionary services
- Smart word predictions
- Spelling & Grammar Check
- Text reader
- Sentence rephrasing
- Language translator
- Personalized practice sessions
- Emoji expressions
Ginger has a feature-limited free plan. The paid plans comprise the Basic plan, which costs $6.40 a month. But it does not offer Sentence Rephraser, Text Reader, Practice Trainer, and Error Analysis features. The fully featured premium plan costs $11.20 a month. You can select an annual discounted plan for lower rates.
The Good: Is easy to use. It is available on Android and iOS devices and also features a Chrome and Safari extension.
The Bad: Needs Flash as well as an internet connection to work. The Live mode is not supported in Office 2003/2013 applications as well as OpenOffice and LibreOffice.
Whitesmoke
Whitesmoke is another smart online grammar check tool that even does translation in over 55 languages. Its key features include:
- Punctuation check
- Spelling & Grammar check
- Language translation services
- Style check
- Plagiarism check
Whitesmoke offers two different types of subscription plans. The Anywhere plan costs $9.95 a month with lower pricing for quarterly, yearly and lifetime subscriptions. The Premium plan comes with some additional features such as integration with Microsoft Word and Outlook, grammar tutorials, multilingual dictionary and free letter and document templates. The premium plan starts off at 14.95 a month.
The Good: Straightforward tool that clearly lays down the various aspects of checking and where your content stands against the standards.
The Bad: Offers lots of options for fixes that can confuse a person who is already weak on the subject. Surprisingly lots of negative reviews online from buyers.
In my review of these tools I realized that despite the tall claims made, ALL of them fell well short of fixing all the grammar and contextual errors that were easy enough to spot by a person with fair knowledge of the language. A non native speaker of the language will never be able to judge if tool suggestions are acceptable or not. I observed that blindly choosing an option will only lead to more errors.
Language is an art, not a science. Automated systems can only do so much. And after reviewing plenty of tools, many of which did not even make it to this list, I feel that most are overpriced and unreliable.
So if you plan on downloading and trying them out for yourself, take it with a pinch of salt. Of the tools I worked with, Grammarly was the one I found most comfortable using. The tool had a nice interface, it picked up plenty of errors and its plagi check wasn't too bad either.
If you know of any smart grammar check tool that worked better for you, please do share them with us.
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