Everyone can use a little help with grammar. Let's be honest, there are a lot of crazy rules when it comes to grammar and even seasoned pros can use a bit of assistance in this department. Do I use a comma here? Is it farmers' market or farmer's market? How do I spell that one word I can never remember?
I'm happy to say Grammarly can help you! If you use Chrome like I do, you can get the free Grammarly extension, which is like autocorrect for your computer. Any time you write something, whether it's an email, a tweet, or a blog post, Grammarly will check what you've written and give you feedback. It will let you know if you misspelled something or used a word incorrectly and much more. If everything is correct, that red little "3" in the picture below will instead be green.
Not only can you get the awesome Chrome extension, but they now have a Microsoft Office (works with Word and Outlook) add-in, though I haven't used it myself.
Another fantastic thing about Grammarly is the website itself; if you're writing a novel or an essay or a blog post and you know that your friends and family are sick of you asking them to read it, or you're not ready to show it to people yet, you can use Grammarly as a second pair of eyes. Upload or simply copy and paste any document to ensure that your writing has no errors.
I uploaded the prologue of my novel and I'm happy to say that I got a score of 84 out of 100. I had 13 alerts that were mostly about commas, either there was one that shouldn't be there or there was one missing. As you can see there were two spelling mistakes, but that's because the story takes place in an alternative universe, so the country has a name that I made up and obviously it's not in the dictionary.
I'm going to continue using both the Grammarly website and the Chrome extension because they're just so darn useful. If you're hesitant to try it, don't be. Grammarly is free to use, or you can get a premium account for $12 a month. They also have this really cool thesaurus.
