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On-line Proofreading: Grammarly Lite plug-in worth getting

Just added the Grammarly plug-in for Chrome and have found it to be a great little app.

The plug-in is free and for the Chrome browser you can download it here.

At first I was not impressed. The 'lite' version says it checks spelling, grammar and punctuation when you are typing online. However, I found that it does not do a good job on grammar or punctuation (in fact it does a horrible job).

That said, it does a great job on spelling, allowing you to double click on a word you've misspelled and replace it with the right one from a drop down menu. You can also right click on a word and get a list of synonyms.  For those that have ever had to Google search to find out how to spell a word correctly, you'll know what a pain that is. Grammarly makes it super easy to fix your mistakes without leaving your document.

Now with regards to grammar and punctuation. I find it misses a ton of mistakes and the ones that it does catch, it fails to make it easy for you to find the mistake. For instance, it will notify you that you have three grammar mistakes, but there's no way to click on a hyperlink or something to take you to those mistakes in your document. Instead, you are forced to visually scan through the document to find the spot with a red squiggly line.

That may not sound like a big deal, but if you've written a long post it can be very annoying when you can't find the squiggly line.

In addition, it sometimes picks up mistakes that aren't mistakes. For instance, two words may be separated by a space yet it identifies a mistakes as though there were two spaces. No matter what you do - inserting a comma or various other things - it continues to say there is a mistake.

In addition, it does not offer alternatives. So it may notify you that your grammar is wrong, but doesn't tell you what is wrong or how to fix it.

Overall though, if only for the spell check and easy fixes for misspelled words, the free Grammarly plug-in is worth getting. It definitely makes you feel more at ease that anything you've posted online isn't filled with egregious errors.

It's also a smart little marketing tool to expose people to the Grammarly service.  The full (paid) service offers far more than the lite version and I have to say, if my editing needs grew I'd definitely consider Grammarly.



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