President’s Message
By Matt Batt, President, The Computer Club, Florida
April 2019 issue, The Journal of The Computer Club
www.scccomputerclub.org/
mbatt453 (at) gmail.com
I always thought I was a decent writer. I know that I write in the passive voice too often, but I always try to keep my sentence structure correct and my sentences easy to read.
Recently, I discovered a piece of software called Grammarly. It reviews your writing and finds typos, spelling errors and grammar mistakes. It’s quite effective. It’s like a proofreader on steroids. Some days, it’s quite humbling.
Grammarly comes in a free or paid version. The free version contains most of the features of the paid version. The free version of Grammarly is more than sufficient for the kind of writing that most of us do with emails, letters, and articles. The paid version gives you an advanced grammar checker, a plagiarism detector and detailed information about each of your grammar mistakes.
There are several ways to install and use Grammarly:
I installed Grammarly as an extension to my Chrome browser. This is the easiest way to get started with it. It is available from www.grammarly.com. Once I installed it, Grammarly was available to check my emails that were composed using the Gmail website online. This chrome extension also works with other online email and document editors.
I installed the Grammarly desktop app (www.grammarly.com/native/windows). The way to use the desktop is to copy and paste what you have written into Grammarly to be checked. Another option is to click on Import and upload a Microsoft Word document directly into Grammarly.
I also installed the Microsoft Office add-in (www.grammarly.com/office-addin/windows) so that Grammarly was active for Microsoft Word and Outlook.
My usage is simple. I use the Word add-in to check documents that I write and the Chrome add-in to check my emails. I won’t tell you how many errors have been caught, but I’m very happy that Grammarly is there for me.
I recently got to take a book that had been already published and proofread by professionals and run it through Grammarly software. Grammarly pointed out many errors of style and some serious grammar errors. Both the author and I were very impressed.
Grammarly extensions are available for the Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge browsers. It is also available for both the iPhone and Android platforms.
Try it, you’ll like it.
[print-me]