I know you all want to know what’s with this title and what the heck does it have to do with me in Cambodia. Lets just say someone with my writing style makes those who like to follow the English rulebook for grammar pretty annoyed. I have had people ask me do I spell check use Microsoft etc in the past and never seem to believe me when I say yes. People fail to see that when your spelling is so messed up not even spell checker can spot it or when you write a sentence how could Microsoft not catch it well I am here to state for my writing it does not. What to do in the past 10 years I have not seen anyone try to one up the Microsoft word checker until now! This is my Review of grammarly.com's Grammar Checker. www.grammarly.com You should check it out and test it out for your self do not just take what I say as the be end to end all as the saying goes. So a few weeks back someone from this company sent me and email to test the website out for a while, I have I will start with the positives. It is extremely in-depth like it will not just under line things for you it will state what grammar mistake you are making what rule your breaking show you examples. I think this would be invaluable to someone just starting out in America but also young kids. It would have helped me to better understand English grammar rules vs memorizing something for a test it would have made the whole process or writing more hands on. That is sort of an issue for me I honestly have no idea about all the grammar rules I seriously forgot the word for a period was clause why this made it difficult for me. Due to the way the website corrects me, it tells me what I did wrong but I did not thoroughly understand the jargon, they do have a dictionary of grammar words http://www.grammarly.com/handbook/. However if your trying to write a basic email to a NGO in my case I don’t want to spend 30-40 mins looking it all up. However on the flip side if I was not so out of touch with more of a school atmosphere or this was used on a substantial report it would be worth my time it depends what help you need. It not only tells you when you did something wrong but if it thinks you are being too wordy which, is a nice feature. It allows you to be more direct and to the point thus making you seem more intelligent and have better stated email reports etc. Another added bonus is the suggestion to increase or make certain words of higher vocabulary or at the very least helps you to see words similar to the ones you have used. I think the greatest benefit to this would be for those really trying to learn grammar rules that it would really keep working with you to help improve your writing style above and beyond what Microsoft is able to do currently. Now I will go “Debby downer” on this and talk about all the things I thought either did not work for me or could use some tweaks. Like I stated above it’s a excellent learning tool however, ill be honest I am sort of lazy and do not feel like taking the 30 mins to learn I want to write up things quickly and send them off at least with Microsoft when it does catch my mistakes they just auto fix them I don’t have to spent all this time figuring out what its trying to tell me to do. The pointing arrow that shows you what it wants to change is difficult to tell where it wants you to fix it will highlight a whole sentence not just that one part it wants fixed. The web site also has a function to be combined into your Microsoft word however; it would not work for me I am assuming because it could not support a mac. It was also sort of annoying that it did not like the word you it always wanted you to type out the person name. I know for learning purpose the set up they have is good but if you just want to go though your paper once you cant its not like Microsoft where you see the mistakes fix and go on sometimes you can re read the same 5 sentences because you do not correct it the first time around. Example it may want you to put a common in but then a few categories later it doesn’t like the world you used then it goes back to that sentences vs just telling you what’s wrong with the whole thing the first time. I will say all in all I will keep using it as one more computer device to check my papers however, while I am happy to finally see a advancement in spellcheck etc from what we had since the 90s to me this web site still needs to be fine tuned before I could say it is my life saver.
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