Upgrade Your Spellcheck

There are a few tools that I’d recommend EVERYONE have – this is one of those.

Grammarly is a grammar and style application that works everywhere – it has extensions for all of your Microsoft products – Word and Outlook included. It has an application for your desktop, the web, even your phone.

While Word spellcheck does a decent job, Grammarly goes a bit further than correcting misspelled words. You can adjust the settings to change how much or what it catches. For example, at my firm, we are more on the casual side, so sometimes I get annoyed by all the suggestions, and I change it so it catches different types of errors.

Grammarly looks at correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery. There’s also a feature where you can scan for plagiarism.

And you can go further, turning on/off suggestions for style – passive voice, Oxford comma, EVEN BIASED LANGUAGE. Hells yeah.

You can’t see it in this list, but it also catches differences in font type – so it alerts you when you have both straight and curly apostrophes!!! (I mean, that’s worth the money right there!)

Grammarly is free to try but there is a premium membership, $140/year. I suggest trying it first and then buying premium – you will definitely want to.

Also, if your firm has strict firewalls in place (don’t we all nowadays?!), just ask your IT department. There is definitely a business case for using Grammarly.

I’ve suggested it to some experienced editors who absolutely love it. Though I suppose I’m an experienced editor (hello, imposter!) – I’ve been doing this as a career for 15 years, let alone all the years before that – and this is the best AI editor I’ve ever used. (I’ve had Grammarly premium since 2017!)

If that’s not enough, and you’re a competitor, Grammarly sends out period emails gamifying the experience!