
Writers should consider a grammar checker an essential business expense.
Free grammar software for mac professional#
Free grammar software for mac free#
I’ve been using the free version for the last year-and-a-half, and according to Grammarly, it’s checked almost two million words that I’ve written. The Premium plan goes further and offers to help you improve your writing. It picked up my spelling and grammar errors, let me switch the wrong word for the right one with a single click, and succinctly explained what I had done wrong. I suddenly discovered a grammar checker that felt genuinely intelligent. Then I ran into Grammarly several years ago. I’ve tested grammar checkers on and off for years, and not much has changed. It nagged me robotically about overuse (or any use) of the passive case and seemed to quote rules more than giving advice. I purchased my first grammar checker in the early 1990s-a DOS program that wasn’t very helpful. My name is Adrian Try, I’ve been writing professionally for over a decade many of my jobs before that involved writing in one form or another. Which is right for you? Read on to find out.

We’ll also analyze four full-featured grammar checkers, free web-based tools, and your word processor’s grammar checker. In this article, we’ll cover Grammarly and ProWritingAid. ProWritingAid’s advice feels like it’s coming from a program rather than a person. It matches Grammarly feature for feature and is more affordable-but it doesn’t feel as slick. ProWritingAid is an excellent alternative. The company also offers significant discounts regularly and provides the best free plan in the business. It’s pricey, but many users find the money well spent.

It includes all of these features and more, and often feels more like an intelligent human pointing out my errors than a computer program. The best tools even help you make your writing more readable and warn of potential copyright violations-all before you hit Send or Publish. Grammar and punctuation errors are also consistently identified. Even if a word is in the dictionary, they can tell if it’s the wrong spelling in context. Today’s grammar checkers have come a long way. They’re robotic tools with no intelligence, and miss all but the most basic errors. Those basic tools did little more than ensure the words you type are in the dictionary.

They’re a lot more sophisticated than the simple spell checkers of yesteryear. It would be more effective to get someone else to look over the text first, but there’s not always someone else around. Why is that? I think it’s because I know what I meant to type, and my brain just assumed that it communicated what I wanted to. Have you had days like that? Too often I notice a typo just after hitting Send on an email or Publish on a blog post.

Wanting to make up for it, she typed a quick note of regret: “I apologize for the typing errow.” It happened way back in the days when typewriters were still commonly used, and perhaps it was the client who pointed out the spelling mistake. The young typist must have been embarrassed.
