Grammarly – A Great Way To Save Tons of Time On Writing Content

Maybe you are like “Digital Dave” and tend to be grammatically challenged. Or even if you are not, you certainly want to save tons of time in your life and your content marketing. In this podcast “Digital Dave” reviews a great free online service that will save you tons of time in your communications and writing (and make you sound like the professional you are).

Episode Transcript

This is Digital Dave, and today we’re going to take a tour of a great online product called Grammarly. And that’s spelled G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.

This product is awesome for people if you’re like me, who are grammatically challenged. What Grammarly is, is … it’s a combination of a spell checker, a grammar checker, and also it gives you information about plagiarism. Meaning that if you are using some research and grabbing text from another site or something like that, it will tell you the frequency of where that information can be found. And so we’re going to take a tour Grammarly today, and I’m going to show you the great features of this product. There are multiple versions of this product. One version is the free version, and certainly, many of you can use the free version. And there is the paid version.

Now, Grammarly has multiple points of entry, which is what really makes it great. There is an outlook plugin, which I have used on some computers. It’s actually excellent for grammar and spell checking your emails, which if you’re, like I said, like me, grammatically challenged, it can take a lot of time. So what Grammarly does extraordinary well is really save you a lot of time when you’re composing just about anything on the web. It also has a plugin for Chrome, which allows you to use Grammarly in forms on any website that you open within the Chrome platform once you have the extension installed. And I’ll actually show you this as it works within WordPress. Which if you are using WordPress or have a blog that has a browser-based admin tool, then you could use this to obviously check your grammar and spelling within that tool as well. So that’s what makes Grammarly a great platform.

Now, I’m going to show you the very first way that you can use Grammarly. And that is through the Grammarly online website itself. And what you do is after you create an account, you log in and you’ll get a dashboard that looks something like this. And you have your option. You can do multiple things here. You can click new and upload a document. This can be a text document or a rich text document, and it will upload it, and it will begin doing its thing spell checking and grammar checking. Now we’ve already put one in here for today to use as an example, and we will use the one … Oh, we didn’t. Okay, so we’re going to go ahead and upload one right now, and you’ll actually get to see this in use.

So I’m going to go ahead and upload, and we’re going to go to a document that we created earlier today just for illustration. And that would be here, and we’ll just do … and this would be an article that we might post to one of our blogs. We have a blog on natural health that we maintain. And this one is an article that already exists on that blog, so you’ll … the grammar part of it won’t show a lot of grammatical issues because we’ve already used it to check it. But you’ll kind of get the idea, as well as you can also check it for plagiarism, which we did check this document and we plagiarized our own website. It showed that we had already written this article.

So the way Grammarly works is that once you load it into the Grammarly website, if you want to go this particular route, it then goes through and just checks your documents. And you get different levels of alerts. So you get red, yellow, and you get green, which are pretty much just … Yellow is more like grammar issues, red are as they say critical issues, and green are the spelling issues. So we’re going to get … kind of scroll through this and click on each one and it’ll tell us what it’s suggesting. It’s saying exercising is a repetitive word, so do we want to change it to something else like using, or applying? We probably don’t. Here’s another one. It doesn’t mean you … it doesn’t say that you have to spend money, you could certainly again, repetitive word, and you could change that just by simply clicking on their suggestion here and it will change that within the text there.

And then we’ll continue to go through this and we’re going to go down just kind of walk through it. Now one way to do this also is you can just click on these directly and it’ll give you a little line that shows you exactly where it’s referencing in your document so that you can see. Now, this was a yellow. We’re going to go ahead and click on this. We’re going to change that. It was suggesting a comma in there. And let’s see what this one says here. Actually, split infinitive, okay … All right. And again, you don’t have to take every recommendation, but certainly most of them you want to take into account. Now this one here, the whole sentence has a sentence fragment, all right. This appears to be an incomplete sentence, consider rewriting it. Okay, so this would be one that we might want to consider re-writing. And we’re not going to go through everyone here.

Here’s a red one, okay. This one says we’re using the wrong spelling for this particular one, so we’re going to go ahead and change that. And it came back as red again, and now it’s suggesting no comma, so we’re going to take that out. So you can see that it does correct the grammar at … it does a great job of correcting the grammar as well as the spelling. That’s okay like anything that is done over and over again. That seems to me like it would be okay, and you can ignore these if you want. You could just click on ignore. Here’s one too. It’s saying too and a comma, so we’re going to add the comma there. Exercising, repetitive word. Again, this is about exercise, so it’s kind of hard not to repeat that word so much. So you get the point.

And then when you’re done, one of the things you can do is you can enable the plagiarism. And I’m going to go ahead and turn this on. Now, I don’t know if this will show up or not, and so it shows up and it says it is pretty much entirely plagiarized, right? Because the whole thing is highlighted … so if I click on it, it’s going to tell me, look, you have 76 words right here that are showing up on another website. Well, this is the website that the article was written for, so we’re going to ignore this. But you can clearly see that it has an issue with that. And then it says another 244 words are unoriginal text. Same thing, same website, and it’s going to be ours. And it’s going to show that it is being copied.

This is what Grammarly … its overall capabilities are. And like I said, I think the best thing about this is the amount of time it saves you. When you’re writing, it really allows you to focus on writing and not so much on looking for … did you put the comma in the right place? Are you using the right term here? The right verb? The right adjective? It really does a great job of making your writing very smooth and proper. So we love Grammarly.

Now the next way as I said that you can use this … and we’re going to look at this same post, or a post, in WordPress. And in WordPress, you can see … Oh, this is one that we’ve added just for the purposes of this. So you’ll see we’ve added an article here in WordPress, and then within that, it’s already checked this particular WordPress form area, and it said it’s found two issues. Now, there are two ways you can step through this. You can step through this by going down and just clicking on it within the actual form field itself, and making the adjustments. Or, which I like to do, you can click on this little thing down here. Now, generally, this will have a G for Grammarly, and it’ll be green until it finds issues. And then it will change, and you’ll see it change with … to a number, and it’ll give you its suggestions. So we have the 16, from … that is not so bad, and then two that are considered wrong.

Now, if you click on this, you’re going to see it opens it up in that … similar to that previous window that we saw when we were actually on the Grammarly site. And you can see that it is really going through and checking each and everything. Repetitive words, again, this one was on exercise, so I’m not going to spend too much time on this one here. And remember … Oh, you know what, I am very sorry. This is the same article, so that’s kind of funny. I think it’s the same article. So anyway, you’ll go through … because we see the afterward here, we corrected that. And then it came back and corrected itself, and wants us to get rid of the comma. So we did that. And so we’re doing the same things that we did before. And again, if you want to go ahead and turn on or off any of the features, you can tun them on or off as you feel necessary.

And you can enable something called vocabulary enhancement, which helps to diversify your writing a bit. So there are even additional features to this that really help you try to write your … to make your writing more proper. So again, we highly, highly, highly recommend Grammarly for anybody who is writing a lot, doing a lot of blog posting, or just writing a lot of emails for that matter. If you use Outlook, it does work. The plugin works within Gmail, it works within Yahoo, as long as you’re in your Chrome browser with the extension as well. So again, the great thing about Grammarly is how much time it saves you. You just can go through and not have to spend a lot of time thinking about your punctuation and spelling and so forth. Again, we highly recommend this to all of our clients, and we use this on a daily basis ourselves and find it extraordinarily helpful. So again, this is a wonderful tool. We hope you have enjoyed this episode, and we hope you will come back and check out our next episode. So thank you so much.