It' nice. There's an icon you can toggle on and off that helps with typos, commas, spelling, and all the nonsense that one can easily miss. Probably most here already have it or use something else, idk.
Does it check full sentences for context when correcting an error? MS Word fucks up a lot in this. For example it only checks the two words right next to eachother for a 'right' place to put a comma. Correct: 'You should really get that checked' MS Thinks is Correct: 'You, should really get that checked' It's gotten to a point where I have to manually decide if a comma makes sense or not.
Tbh i don't use grammarly's sentence checking stuff. I think that's their premium service. I've tried using Hemmingway.com for going over stuff like that - its free too and easy to use, but i don't use it anymore. What I found with Hemmingway is that I started changing the way i write to keep that software happy and the writing didn't sound like me anymore. After having written for some time now i spot my own sentence problems and correct it in edit. What I'm talking about with Grammarly is literally something you download and then inside Word you have to go to add ons and select it. After, Word looks exactly the same, except there's a green icon in the upper right corner that you can toggle. It highlights the stupid typos that are common, like using 'than' instead of 'that' or 'an' instead of 'on'. It picks up if i omitted an article or used redundant stuff. it highlightes where it thinks i used the wrong word. It gives its opinion on commas, not all of which i agree on, but at least i look at it. I mean, its easy and free and i catch tons of bs that even my most careful checking can miss. For a novice writer that uses Word, I would think it'd be very helpful.
I use Grammarly with Google Docs and I have tried the Word plugin. I think it works better in Chrome than Firefox when you're talking about Google Docs. It's pretty intuitive and one of the main things it does is help you stay consistent in your spelling. It's easy to dismiss suggestions or add to your personal dictionary, especially where you have colloquial expressions or word usage that may not be used normally. For most purposes, the free version is sufficient. For your edits, especially final ones, I think it would be better to have human eyes on it, but that's my novice opinion.
Does anyone know if Grammarly can be installed as a plug-in for Libre Office Writer or for SoftMaker Ofice Textmaker?
The Hemingway app has absolutely ridiculous threshold for what it considers difficult to read sentences. It is not even first-grade high-school stuff. If the sentence has more than 14 words and uses longer words - boom, difficult to read according to them. Most fiction books you feed it will be in red.
Update: At a friend's urging, I tried Grammarly. Grammarly is gone. I tested it on a manuscript for a book I have just about finished. I had it set to American English. My rough guesstimate is that I dismissed approximately 95% of Grammarly's suggested corrections. That's about as bad as Word's built-in grammar checker (which I keep turned off because it's so brain dead). I knew that Grammarly installs as an extension to Word, so that wasn't a surprise. But I also have LibreOffice and Softmaker Office, neither of which integrates directly with Grammarly. I wanted (and expected) a desktop program that I could open in a separate window, import a .docx file, and have it checked. Everything I had read about Grammarly suggested that it installs as a desktop program. I couldn't find it. It installed a desktop icon but, when I clicked that, it told me that Grammarly was already running. That's not helpful. I can't use it the way they have it configured. It is now past history. I will continue to write the way my grandparents taught me to write.
Update to the update: TLDR version ==> Grammarly lies. I contacted Grammarly after my brief experiment with it, to complain that there was supposed to be a "desktop" version available, but that the only version I could find installed as an extension or add-in to Word and to my browser. I received an e-mail from Grammarly support informing me that there is, indeed, a desktop version: [Emphasis added] On the basis of this e-mail, I downloaded an installer from the link he provided, and installed it. As soon as I had done that, I encountered a big 'G' icon popping up in my browser window, and also when I opened documents in Word. That means I had not installed a stand-alone desktop app, I had installed a resident extension/add-on ... which is exactly what I had specifically told them I didn't want. So ... Grammarly lies. Between that and the fact that in my testing it was approximately 95% useless, I can't recommend it.
Here's the thing: for a writer aspiring to publishability, there's no alternative to developing a strong command of the language, including punctuation, grammar, and style. Such command is learned by a combination of reading good writers and studying tutorials and references. Those two activities feed off each other, each making the other more productive. It's not enough (for most non-geniuses) to see good writing — one needs to learn what it's doing, and how, and why it's so good. Yes, it can be nice to have a decent spelling-checker point out likely mistakes and repetitions, and ditto for punctuation. But as others are pointing out here, Word's suggestions on grammar and punctuation appear to be about as likely to be wrong as to be right. Its spelling dictionary is riddled with errors and non-words, and of course no machine-driven approach will ever be superior to an informed human in differentiating between homonyms. Personally, I leave real-time spell-checking active and nearly all other automation turned off. Like The Elements of Style originally, tools like Grammarly and Word's built-in grammar checker are created for non-professional writers who find themselves in the position of having to write for their work or other purposes. While such aids cannot replace a capable editor, they can improve bad writing, or at least not make it too much worse. They can't generally improve good writing, other than occasionally by pointing out an oversight, although they can easily make good writing worse. (BTW TEoS's thoughts on passive voice were written at a time when entire newspaper columns, especially in small-town papers, could be written almost exclusively in passive voice. It was at least a vogue and possibly a self-aware lark. Nowadays critique groups overflow with passive-police, an outright majority of whom are in fact incapable of correctly identifying what does and does not constitute an instance of passive voice, and whose own writing is rife with more egregious faux pas.) Artificial Intelligence has been over-promising and under-delivering for more than fifty years now, and I've watched the mismatch between promises and results for at least the last 45 of those. Yes, today AI is capable of some remarkable things, but it's rarely as good as its naive boosters believe. And non-AI approaches to grammar checking are simply doomed from the get-go. Investing in a non-AI approach would be like investing in a project to develop a perpetual-motion machine. I recently saw a television ad for Grammarly that was all I'll ever need to see to know not to go anywhere near it. It actually made a sample text worse, and ungrammatical to boot, while boasting about its prowess to millions of television viewers. That is the commercialized, monetized culture of mediocrity in which we live.
Since I don't watch television (at all), I had no idea that Grammarly advertises on that medium. I just watched some of their ads on YouTube. They are rather ... cringeworthy.
Good lord, if you're a literary titan like some around here then do us all a favor and skip Grammarly. For the other 99.997%, it's a reasonable option if you want to run your work through a quick filter from time to time. It's free and it comes as an add-in for Word.
It's the fact that it's an add-in for Word that irritates me. I would love to have a Grammarly sitting in reserve on my computer, that I could open if and when I felt like it and run some text through. That would be a "desktop" program (or "app"). Grammarly claims to offer a desktop app. However, they apparently don't have a desktop app. They only offer a memory-resident app that installs itself as an extension to Word and to any browsers you have on your computer -- without asking permission. That's what I object to. I'm a big boy -- I can tie my own shoes, brush my own teeth, and call up Grammarly if and when I feel a desire for an AI review of my writing. What I don't want or need as Grammarly constanrly lurking in my computer's memory, peering over my shoulder as I type. The fact that it's wrong more often than it's right just adds insult to injury.
