I used Grammarly to grammar check this post because they emailed me out of the blue and offered me a $100 Amazon gift card if started a blog post with the words “I used Grammarly to grammar check this post because…”
And hey, by the way, Grammarly says that previous sentence is 100 percent perfect.
I’m a writer, yo!
Seriously, gang, I was pleased to have the chance to do a Grammarly review. I’d heard about the service, but never got around to trying their seven day free trial. Happily, Nick and Liliya offered me a reviewer’s premium account for the next couple of months. In return, I promised to become an affiliate and not only write this blog post, but also record an in-depth video review.
Grammarly Review From A New User’s Perspective
For the video, I opted to not do any preparatory research or read any instructions. Beyond testing my login, I didn’t even look at the for-pay version of the site until I pressed “record” on the video. I wanted to have an experience as close as possible to that of a new user.
In the Grammarly review video, I tested a blog post and a fiction piece, since those are the two kinds of writing I’m most likely to do.
The results:
I won’t give away how it all went down… you should watch the video! If you want to skip ahead to my verdict, there’s a clue about three minutes in. If you’re interested in going through the process of using Grammarly step by step, I hope you’ll watch the whole thing. I think it’s the best way to really figure out if Grammarly is something you need. I think my Grammarly review gives the service a fair shake from my perspective.
Have You Used Proofreading Software?
I’m curious to know if any of you have used proofreading software like Grammarly (or some offline equivalent). Was it useful? Let me know in the comments!
And if you’re even a little interested in trying a proofreading suite after watching my Grammarly review video, click to sign up for a seven day free trial. Put Grammarly to the test… if you decide to sign up at the end of the free trial and your own Grammarly review, I’ll earn a small commission.
Timothy P. Callahan
I used a program very similar to this called Autocrit and I had pretty much the same experience you did here. I found it interesting but in the end I never used it, mostly because I found myself spending more time going, “nope, that’s someone talking. No, that sentence makes sense.” It was great at finding a typo or two but even then it let some obvious mistakes go through and I wound up having to re-read it anyway. So, for me, it just seemed like doing one more step in my writing that I didn’t need to do.
Although, watching you struggle with some of the idiosyncrasy of the program was pretty entertaining.
Matthew Wayne Selznick
Hah! Yeah, there were a few flat-out stop errors during that walkthrough, but I wanted to give Grammarly a fair shake. If I’d been in a free trial and those snags had happened, I would have clicked away and never looked back. I hope the folks at Grammarly review the entire video — I’ve basically done (nearly) free user experience testing for them — and use it to improve the experience.