An Argentinian's Journey: Using Grammarly to Reach English-Speaking Audiences.
Grammarly detects a wide range of errors but it goes beyond basic spelling and grammar. Corrections are in real-time is a tool invaluable for those who don't have an editor to proofread.
Highlights
Grammarly for Non-Native Speakers: See how it helps improve writing in English.
Top Grammarly Features: Learn about its AI tools and content suggestions.
Real-Time Corrections: Improve your writing instantly with live feedback.
Since English is my second language, Grammarly's optimization toolkit helps me write for an English-affluent speaking audience. I never imagined that English-speaking, financially savvy individuals would be able to understand how I, a native-born Argentinian, think. Let me share how Grammarly helps me communicate my financial and business insights.
What is Grammarly?
Grammarly is a typing assistant. In its most basic form, it uses AI features to help spark ideas, fix grammatical and spelling errors, and rephrase text. It's not a complete replacement for proofreading, but Grammarly is a tool that allows freelance writers to deliver cleaner work in less time.
More advanced tools include customizing style, tone, and context-specific language and detecting plagiarism. Recently, it's added a generative AI tool. It moves beyond just correction and helps brainstorm, rephrase, and generate text—great for if you're stuck with writer's block or working with a sentence you can't get to sound right.
Seamless Integration
Grammarly's structure is simple and intuitive. You can use their website as a text editor and type or paste text. Then, it asks you about the communication style and level of knowledge of the target audience and starts making corrections and suggestions.
Remote work often involves managing multiple platforms and tools, which can be challenging. Grammarly's seamless integration with various platforms makes maintaining consistency in your writing easier. The browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari ensure you get writing support across all web-based platforms, from email to social media. The desktop application integrates with Windows and Mac, allowing you to use Grammarly in your preferred text editors, like Microsoft Word and Google Docs. Additionally, Grammarly's mobile keyboard ensures you maintain high writing standards even when composing emails or messages on your phone.
It is worth noting that Grammarly's UI and performance are consistent across the different platforms mentioned. The quality of the corrections and ease of use is the same regardless of which device or version you choose, which is a relief for those of us who work with different devices.
Real-Time Grammar and Punctuation Checking
Grammarly detects a wide range of errors, including subject-verb agreement, incorrect pronoun usage, misplaced modifiers, faulty parallel structure, typos, missing commas, and much more. So, it goes beyond basic spelling and grammar. Errors are typically underlined with colored hints (red for grammar, blue for punctuation). Clicking on the error gives you an explanation and suggests a correction. You can choose to accept or decline the suggestion.
When I started using it, I realized that I was writing long and complex sentences, with many commas and verbs that prevented me from conveying a clear idea. Seeing the same mistakes over and over again helped me to improve.
The fact that the corrections are in real-time is invaluable if you are in the middle of the creative process. Fixing writing flaws on the fly is much simpler than correcting a finished article full of flaws that require rewriting entire paragraphs. Also, when working for hours on an article, it is common not to notice subtle errors after reading the same paragraph time and time again. Having Grammarly allows you to detect these errors on the spot and correct them effortlessly. This tool is invaluable for those like me who don't have an editor to proofread every little detail of an article, essay or professional email.
Writing Optimized Content
Grammarly's array of features extends beyond basic error correction, helping you optimize your content for maximum impact. It offers concise suggestions that identify and recommend the removal of unnecessary words, making your writing more direct and powerful. Furthermore, Grammarly improves clarity by highlighting confusing or lengthy sentences and offering ways to simplify them, ensuring your message is conveyed clearly.
I tend to default to overly wordy phrasing. Grammarly highlights this and suggests better alternatives. It even understands tone. As you write, it will suggest alternate word choices that better fit the tone you're going for in your piece. That helps you be more consistent throughout the article and reads better for the audience.
Don't settle for generic.
The tool also provides vocabulary enhancement, suggesting synonyms and alternative word choices to enrich your text and avoid repetition. It also avoids expressions that are too specific and may alienate some of the audience.
With the addition of Grammarly's AI enhancement tool, you get advanced writing improvement capabilities that provide deeper insights and more nuanced suggestions. It is a great tool for tackling the terrifying blank page.
You may have an outline or bullet points of what you want to write, but you feel stuck. In those cases, Grammarly's AI can suggest ideas and shape the text to help keep you in a steady flow state.
Complementing SEO optimization
This AI tool works seamlessly with SEO tools, complementing them by ensuring that your content is optimized for search engines and polished and engaging for human readers. For those who work with SEO optimization, it is pretty common that a text that is perfect for search engines is, at the same time, unreadable for humans. By focusing on aspects like clarity, vocabulary, and conciseness, Grammarly can contribute to creating content that resonates well with both search engines and human audiences without altering the keywords, which are the core of the text. This way, you can create content that ranks well and resonates with your audience, finding the balance between SEO efficiency and readability.
Final thoughts:
Mastering a language in a professional environment is very challenging if you are not a native speaker. For me, using this tool has been a great help in taking the quality of my writing to the next level, resonating with new audiences, and gaining new clients. To this day, I am not afraid to express complex economic or financial ideas as my trusted tool backs me up.
Is Grammarly an absolute must for your writing process? Not necessarily. However, will it help you to maintain high standards and provide valuable insights? Absolutely
It is not a perfect tool. It's hard to replicate a great human editor, especially one that will push you to write better. Sometimes, Grammarly wants me to make a correction, but I know it's not right in context. So, you'll still want to read your writing and not blindly accept every suggestion. Though, in my experience, Grammarly nails it way more often than not. The free version on its own is a no-brainer for any writer. If you're looking for an online editor and grammar tool, Grammarly is the first place to look.
