Hi, guys! Have you tried the Human Proofreader and the Plagiarism features in Grammarly? And if so, what are your thoughts on them?
I've never understood why one would use a plagiarism checker. Is it for people who are working with other people's work, like teachers or magazine editors?
I'm with @ChickenFreak on that one. What is a plagiarism checker for? Or rather, what does it actually check for? Word combinations, similar plot devices (how could a computer do this?) Titles? Character names? And 'human proofreader?' What is that? Would like to know more as well. Have you used these features yourself, @DaniEllis ? I'd google them myself, but I don't want to increase my search-related load of spam. Grammarly already spams my FB account a lot. I indicated interest in them a long time ago, and now they won't go away.
Plagiarism checker is primarily for academic writing where you routinely refer to other's work. For the writer, in particular in the 'soft' disciplines (journalism, history, politics etc.), it can happen that you write a lot that's almost identical to something else, and you can use the checker to see what you need to rewrite or where you need to add citations. It also happens in the 'hard' disciplines (natural sciences like physics or chemistry) that you write common knowledge with standard phrases that actually need to be cited (that was tolerated a lot in the past, since those scientists tend to actually measure things that were not measured before, and the not-citing happened only in the introductory sections.) For readers, or reviewers, the checker is there to check if a writer has plagiarized, which is not as uncommon in academe as one might believe (sometimes unwittingly as above, but often enough with intent.) Or to spot other deception, like ghostwriting (ghostwriters tend to copy somewhere, since they're often not specialists in the disciplines they write for.)
No, I haven't. Those two are premium features, so I wanted to know if they worked well and people's opinion on them, before paying. I'm more interest in the human proofreader but I thought it would be good to know about the other as well.
It appears that the human proofreader is a human who proofreads a document, for a per-word fee. I could see someone using this as a final check of, say, their resume or job-search cover letter, or other brief and very important documents. I can't see it as being of much use to a writer. Edited to add: It also seems clear that the premium subscription doesn't pay for the human proofreading. It just buys you the right to pay even more, for human proofreading.
Yes. Plagiarism is a problem with niche publications and trade publications that accept content by people who are professionals in an industry who are not writers. When I edited a web publication, I found using a plagiarism checker an absolute must. You'd be surprised at how many people cut and paste articles from the internet and then submit it as their own work to get writing credit for their resumes in order to brand themselves experts...So much so that we had to add (paraphrasing) "Submissions must be your original work. Submissions containing cut and pasted portions of other works or from Wikipedia entries will not be accepted" to our writing guidelines. For the OP, I haven't tried Grammarly's. I can't remember the name of the one we used, but it was used by a lot of college professors at the time. (clarity edit)
That makes sense. It's the idea that a writer might need a plagiarism checker to check their own fiction--not that that was specifically said in this thread, but I've seen it elsewhere--that is disturbing. That has the vibe of checking to see if they can get away with what they totally know they're doing.
Sounds a lot like the old method behind Angie's List (it may actually still be like that, I don't know) You could skim some of the features, but if you wanted to get something done on there you had to pay for your account, and then you had to pay the guy you eventually hired. Not a good business model when the things your customers pay to use is only a gateway to pay even more, just saying. Now, a human proofreader is not hard to find outside of grammarly, I'm sure you have friends that are smart, or you know a Grammar Nazi.
