Grammarly—Your Automatic Editor

Being able to express yourself by writing has always been an important business skill. However, in today’s world this skill is more important than ever.

I’ve advocated for a long time that demonstrating your expertise by being able to write an article describing a particular insurance question and/or issue is an important way to attract clients. There are more opportunities today to publish online than ever. A new article should be added to your agency website at least once a week.

The new LinkedIn publishing platform is another great place for you to add articles that demonstrate your expertise. People want to do business with those they know, like, and trust—and know what they are doing.

However, if you are like me, high school English was not your favorite subject.

You see, it is one thing to be able to write an article, but something else entirely to be able to write an excellent article. Before you ever publish anything, you need to make sure it is free of spelling errors, grammatically correct, and appropriate for the audience.

Hiring an editor to do this can be expensive. Editing your documents can be a drag, especially if you are in a time crunch. Fortunately, there are some new online tools that can help. Last year I wrote about one tool is use—The Hemingway App. A new version is now available that you should check out.

Another tool I use to check all of my writing before it is published is Grammarly.

Grammarly is an automated proofreader that corrects contextual spelling mistakes, checks for more than 250 grammar errors, enhances vocabulary usage, and suggests citations. While Microsoft Word has a grammar checker, it does not provide as extensive an analysis of your writing as Grammarly.

The program allows you to identify the type of writing it should analyze. For example, in the business writing section you can choose business letter, business email, report, memo, or website article. Grammarly will help identify multiple types of errors in your writing including:

• Confused prepositions
• Overuse of the passive voice
• Wordy sentences
• Wrong use of word
• Contractions
• Plagiarism detection

After using this grammar checker on many articles, I found out I have a bad habit of ending sentences with prepositions.

I’m also guilty of using the occasional squinting modifiers. Don’t remember what that is? Grammarly provides a help window to explain the issue in detail.

Yes, these are finer points of grammar but knowing my bad habits helped me make my writing just a little bit better.

There are three ways you can use this editing platform:

1. Upload a document onto the Grammarly site to be analyzed.
2. Install the Microsoft Word Grammarly plug-in to make editing changes right in your Microsoft Word document.
3. Install the Chrome browser extension so you can use the editing advice on any website. The Chrome extension is available at no cost.

I use all three options.

Grammarly has a limited free version. A premium subscription costs $30 per month or $140 annually. I have the annual plan. On the Grammarly website you have the option to send your work to a human proofreader for $.02 a word.

Grammarly will not replace a human proofreader. But, I use it to “tune up” my writing.

How do you make sure articles you publish are grammatically correct and without spelling errors? Let me know.