Better Grammar: Grammarly Beats Office Checker

I would like to say that I am sorry for Microsoft Office, but I am not. As a writer who writes mostly in English, but without having the benefit of being a native speaker of the language, I am quite sensitive about the quality of grammar and spelling checking tools. I imagine that I am not the only one in the big world trying to find solutions that improve the quality of their English writing. This is a first article in a series of writers’ tools product reviews.

The first thing I think of when comparing the Microsoft Office spelling and grammar checker to Grammarly is PRICE versus PERFORMANCE in the CONTEXT of my NEEDS.
It’s true that Microsoft Office does a lot and that it has other software in that bundle that can be useful in many ways. However, as writers, we just need a text editor and a good checker.

Provided we have a good spelling and grammar checker, we can use a simple editor such as Notepad or similar, which are included in the tool box that comes with our operating system at no extra cost.

In my case, when it come to MS Office Word, I like two things about it: the ability to make my text look pretty while I write and the possibility to insert hyperlinks. One big downside to the latter is that the links do not have the option to be opened in a new window/tab, but that only takes a few clicks to fix.

For those advantages alone, I simply don’t see how I could put MS Word at the top of my list of favorite text editors.

Now, it’s true that Grammarly is an added expense. However, I believe it to be justified as long as a text that looks perfect in Word, once passed through Grammarly becomes red all over – because Grammarly highlights mistakes in red.

I also like the fact that it is a product that doesn’t force me to buy another product in order to use it. So, while having my texts checked with Microsoft tools requires me to have Office, Grammarly is free of such burdens.

Furthermore, if you are the occasional writer, with Grammarly you can choose for how long you will use the service, the minimum being one month. If your writing project will last three months, that’s what you pay for.

Granted, if you account for the fact that MS Office Home and Student edition costs over 100 dollars and it gives you Word, Excel, PowerPoint and One Note for lifetime use, while Grammarly costs almost 20 dollars/month, you might be discouraged from buying a subscription to the service. In the grand scheme of things, if you don’t use Excel, PP and OneNote, the package doesn’t do much for you as a writer. Personally, I would rather have a super enhanced version of Word than all the other stuff I will never use more than one time a year.

On the other hand, we are all reluctant to make investments without guarantees of quality service. Furthermore, we don’t really trust the shiny and fluffy marketing texts.
So, here is a list of what Grammarly does, including the weaknesses of the product. I hope that this information will help you to make an informed decision.

• Spelling: it checks your words and it is capable of identifying misused words through its contextual spell check. Weakness: words that have recently made it into the language could be identified as misspelled. Example: e-mail/email, ebook/e-book, and highly scientific or industry-specific terms. Furthermore, it may have a problem with special characters, such as brackets. However, if you know what you are doing and what you are writing about, this pitfall is easy to avoid.
• Grammar: it verifies the grammar and syntax (150+ checks and comprehensive explanations). Weakness: Sometimes the explanations are too long, and extra focus is required to go through them. On the upside, it is a great opportunity to refresh your theoretical knowledge or to learn about things like “dangling modifiers”, which you probably didn’t learn in your 8th grade English language classes. Furthermore, these explanations can help you decide whether Grammarly has a hiccup (unavoidable, as a human or computer algorithm).
• Citations: Grammarly checks your texts against a wide range of online texts, and it points out the misquoted or plagiarized bits. Advantage 1: Once it detects something that could be considered plagiarism, it suggests citations, by style (Chicago, AP, etc.). Advantage 2: Detecting plagiarism is an optional feature and it can be disabled by one click. Weakness: Clichés and commonly used expressions/idioms will also be regarded as plagiarism if they are bigger than two or three words. Nonetheless, as a rule, we tend to avoid those as much as possible, so applying some common sense cures this illness, as well.
• Other advantages: Proofreading by writing type (General, Business, Academic, Technical, Creative, Casual), 100% web-based (for those of you who prefer it that way), a little Word add-on that will open your text in your Grammarly account page (it only works with older versions of Word/Windows – Windows 7 was not covered the last time I checked).

I will not bore you with more details than that. I can tell you that I have been successfully using Grammarly for more than half a year now, and I am a big fan of it. I would like Grammarly to make a real add-on for the various text editors, so that I can check my texts without opening a web browser, and I would really like it to update its database of words to include the geek terms. Furthermore, a distinction between US/UK English would also be helpful to most of us.

Hopefully, these issues will be solved in the near future. Nonetheless, their existence does not make Grammarly a bad product. Not at all.

Now, to the stinky part: MONEY.

Every individual subscription plan has a 7-day free trial. Feel free to check it and tell me your opinion on it. (You can cancel your subscription anytime in those 7 days. After that you will be asked to provide a payment method.) They also have offers for education institutions and businesses. You can check them out here.

Note: Yes, that banner is an affiliate link. If you resent me for it just go to the Grammarly homepage (opens in a new window/tab).

• Monthly Subscription — $19.95 / month
• Quarterly Subscription — $13.32 / month billed as a one-time payment of $39.95.
• Annual Subscription — $7.95 / month billed as one payment of $95.45.