While taking multiple classes during my Undergraduate Degree that require great writing skills, I noticed that most students had trouble with proofreading and fixing their grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation. Even if some of those students tried to, reviewing and editing a document that is thousands of words long can be difficult and there is always something that may be missed. The same thing would happen to me. Most of the time I would proofread, but I would always miss a few errors that would end up lowering my grade significantly. 

All that changed when I discovered Grammarly.

Grammarly is an application/browser extension that finds those mistakes for you and suggests the best fixes. That includes any text that you write while you are on a browser and even text that you write in applications like Microsoft Word, Slack, and many more. Because of Grammarly, I do not have to worry about spending my time reading every single sentence over and over again to find the small mistakes that I made. Not all suggestions are necessary. When that happens you can just click ignore or add to Grammarly’s dictionary so that the application will not bother you again about it in the future.

Grammarly is pretty flexible since it lets you choose which websites you want and how you want it to act on each website. Some of the choices are checking for writing suggestions, showing definitions and synonyms via double click, correcting spelling automatically, and many more. 

Furthermore, if you have Grammarly enabled, it only takes up a small space on your screen. There is one small circular green button in the bottom right of the browser or application which you can click for a panel to open up. That panel shows you the more detailed explanations of your potential errors. If you do not like clicking that button there is no problem. Additionally, every mistake is marked with a red line which you can click on and select if you want to change the word or avoid the suggestion.

Grammarly is also supported on mobile phones and works as an extension of your keyboard.

There are a few applications that are not supported by Grammarly yet, but there is a solution for that as well. You can open a new document at Grammarly and copy/paste your text there which will give you all the feedback that you would get in a supported application or browser.

The best part is that it is completely free. There are more advanced versions for writers or businesses but as a college student, the free version of Grammarly covered all of my needs.

If you are writing regularly and you find yourself making errors, you need to start using Grammarly.