3 Grammar Tools that Make Your Writings Neat
I’m a writer.
I write book reviews, newspaper articles, and fiction for various literary journals in my mother-tongue: Hungarian; but I’m also a content strategist at an international IT company where I write in English.
A lot.
I had to realize that on this level it is not enough to be understood, you have to know English really well.
I’m far from it, but I want to improve. That’s one of the reasons why I have begun publishing on Medium. For practice. And for fun, of course.
I want to start with this autobiographical introduction, because I do need grammar checker tools for my work. I have tried more than a dozen of these. The following three help me a lot and I hope they will be helpful for you also.
Ginger
Ginger is an online proofreading application. It contains text reader, sentence “rephraser,” dictionary, and many more feature besides the grammar checker.
Ginger has extensions in Chrome and Safari. It checks every sentence you write in your browser, highlights the mistakes, and offers possible correction. It is quick and automatic, so you can spot the typos in your emails instantly. You just have to click on the offered correction and the app fixes the error.
When you highlight a word in a text, the software displays a pop-up with the definition of the given word. Really annoying. You can turn off this function in the settings.
Arguably the most useful feature of Ginger is that you don’t have to copy/paste text into a UI.
Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway had the strictest and clearest style of the great American writers of the twentieth century. The Hemingway App helps you to write as boldly as Hemingway did.
Well, at least almost.
The Hemingway App not only checks your grammar, but also your style. It highlights the sentences that are hard to read. You can split or shorten your sentences until the highlight disappears.
Okay, let’s test it.
Hemingway’s Nobel-prize winner novellet, The Old man and the Sea, begins with the following sentences:
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.”
Beautiful, right? Now put it to the Hemingway editor and see what happens.
As you see none of the sentences are hard to read, but one of them is very hard to read. Otherwise, Hemingway’s text performed well. Because it doesn’t contain any adverbs and the readability is okay.
Thus even Hemingway himself could have made good use of this tool.
Grammarly
The big fish. Grammarly isn’t just a grammar checker, it watches the context, looks to the punctuation, checks the sentence structure and the text style.
It works as a word processor with an extremely helpful grammar checker which mark your critical issues on the margin. You can fix the errors with a simple click or you can read the explanation of the error as well as the respective grammar rule. There is the option to upload files for grammar checking, but downloading the document written on Grammarly UI is also an option.
The UI is simple and elegant with a lot of white space. Let’s take a look how it deals with some serious mistakes:
It also has free browser extensions that help you write mistake-free on websites. Double clicks on a word show definitions and synonyms as Ginger do.
The free version marks only the critical mistakes. The premium takes care of the advanced issues, too.
These tools are helping me a lot along my way. Maybe these are worth a try even if you are an expert of English language.
Do you know other smart grammar tools? Share them in the comment section. I’d love to hear your opinion.
