- The bane of my existence for as long as I can remember has been my spelling and grammar, especially my spelling. Just from the days I was in school, I was a terrible speller. Now, I mitigate that challenge by using a spell check and grammar checking tool called Grammarly. Now, the first time that I showed that program on this channel is way back in 2013. I've been using the same spell and grammar checker since then. It's evolved and the use case has evolved and with back-to-school hard upon us, I thought it would be a great time today to revisit spell and grammar checking and more with Grammarly on DottoTech. Steve Dotto here, how the heck you doing this fine day? And it is with a certain degree of trepidation that I enter once again into the world of spell and grammar checking because I feel a little bit insecure about this whole space because I'm a terrible speller. And as a terrible speller, all the other terrible spellers out there know that it is for us a point where we are somewhat embarrassed I guess by our lack of spelling ability. But, I've used a tool for a very long time called Grammarly that improves my communications dramatically. Grammarly started for me as a spell checker, but it's also a grammar checker and they've evolved it into a plagiarism checker as well. But more on that later. When I first showed you Grammarly, the main features that I were showing you were spell and grammar checking, and those are gonna be the exact same as I show you today. What has changed is not so much our need for spell and grammar checking, but where we need that help. Whereas in the past, we used to primarily write in office documents, today we write anywhere and everywhere that we're communicating, typically in email clients or in Facebook or Instagram posts or in tweets. We are writing in a variety of different areas at a variety of different paces. Sometimes we're just firing off really quick responses, which introduces whole new opportunities for us to make mistakes. Grammarly assists in all of those areas, so that's what I wanted to show you today. But before we dive in, one caveat and that I wanna let you know about is I am a paid-up member. I pay for Grammarly's premium service, which is about $140 a year on an annual basis. I pay for that, but I'm also a Grammarly affiliate. So if you click on the link below, that is an affiliate link. I just wanted to make sure you knew that as we move ahead. So let's take a look at Grammarly itself. And where the tool is most often used for me is in a web browser. We install it as an add-on to a browser, and that's where most of us are gonna be using Grammarly. There is a desktop version of it available on the Mac, and it will install in the Windows version only of Microsoft Office. So you can use the same tools in those spaces. But for most of us, we're gonna be using it in our browser. And it doesn't matter whether we're using an office suite of tools like Google Drive or Microsoft Office in our browser. And here we see it installed here as a browser add-on right here. And you can see that I'm using the premium version. Now, typically speaking, for the most part for me at any rate, most of my writing occurs in email. That's where I do most of my writing, and consequently that's where I make most of my mistakes. And Grammarly integrated with a browser means that it's constantly monitoring everything that's happening within the browser, and it will give us corrections on the fly. Now, this real-time correction of spelling is very valuable 'cause typically speaking we're working at a fairly breakneck pace as we're doing these sorts of communications. So as I write messages, I often make punctuation errors or more often than not spelling mistakes, and even more often, typos. I got fat fingers, and I occasionally make typos. And we can see here just a litany of them listed out in this email that I'm about to send. Obviously, what Grammarly does is it goes through, and it highlights our mistakes, and it allows us quick access to corrections just by highlighting, moving our cursor over top of the red underline which tells me that there's a problem, allowing me to correct it just by dropping my mouse down and then clicking on the correction. But Grammarly goes beyond that because sometimes we want context as well. And if we click here on the mistakes, this little badge here tells me what mistakes I'm making and allows me to open the Grammarly editor which is really the same engine, well, it's all the same engine, but pretty much the same interfaces we have when we're working in the app itself. And it gives me a digest of all of the different mistakes and errors that it finds and allows me just by clicking on them to correct them as I go. So from that perspective, very easy to use, and because it's right there in front of you in real time as it's happening, more often than not, you're gonna find your mistakes before you accidentally send them. So that's number one, spell checking, grammar checking, right within our email. But the exact same challenges happen when we're in a blog post or when we are on Facebook and we're responding to and communicating with our friends. And probably in this environment, it might be even worse 'cause typically speaking, we're firing off really rapid comments and feedback in these different social networks. And we see the exact same interface, where it's catching the same mistakes, giving us the same way to make corrections or to go into the editor itself and check them all and work our way through the document before we accidentally send it. Well, I should point out here that if you do have certain words that you know are spelled right that Grammarly identifies as wrong, you can save your own custom dictionary and add it to dictionary here as well. So that's for me, probably this alone, this feature alone within the social platforms, within email and within social networking, catching my spell checking, that to me is worth the price of admission for Grammarly, which as I say, if you purchase the premium version, is $11 a month. But everything I am saying, that's if you pay a year in advance, but everything I'm showing right here, which is the spell checking and basic grammar checking is available in the free version. So you can install this in your browser, have all of this available for you for free, the premium version includes some additional intelligence in the editor, such a readability, vocabulary enhancements, and plagiarism, which we will touch on in a few moments. So that gives you a good idea of how you can use Grammarly right out of the gate and make you a better communicator for free. Now, if we go in to the editor itself, now here we see it in the browser, it looks the exact same if I happen to be looking at the desktop app on the Mac, we see more documents. So this is if you're writing blog posts, if you're a student and you're writing papers, you can work right within this environment where you can go into this, basically a word processor and you can write within this word processing environment. Now, one of the nice advancements that they've recently added to Grammarly is we used to just have plain text. We used just have to write the plain text, and if we wanted to format it with bold or italics or bullet points, we used to have to go into another application. So there was some copying and pasting going back and forth from Grammarly as you're doing your spell and grammar checking into whatever application you actually wanna format your document in. You can do all of that formatting now right within Grammarly here. So let me just go to a document that I have, an existing document. Here is one, a blog post that I created. And you can see that I'm creating, that I'm creating bold face copy, et cetera, right within that document itself. Now, here you see some additional features in Grammarly. We've looked at spell checking, but now we see some grammar checking and some clarity checking. So here as it's reading through the document that I posted, it finds some issues right here, this blue underline, with this sentence. And let's see what it says about this sentence here. So I click on it here, it says, this is a hard-to-read sentence. A general audience might find it hard to read, so I can remove unnecessary words or split it into two sentences. Well, this is a machine telling me that my language is less than perfect. I should probably take some umbrage to this, but let's give the machine learning the benefit of the doubt, read through this sentence and see if they're indeed correct. However, somewhat less than 20% of those retiring are in a comfortable financial position comma, even more are not on board with the concept because they are like me, and I imagine you, passionate about, then I recognize right away, that this is typical of my writing. I wrote this sentence the way that I speak. And it is a bit of a run-on sentence, and it would be far better writing were I to break it into two separate sentences and clean it up a bit. So I think here, they're spot on. Now, I still might decide to go with this because it is in my voice. And depending on where it's being published, it still might be an appropriate thing to publish, but it's worth flagging. So we should recognize that these correctors, the way that Grammarly is proofreading your copy is based on machine learning. It's based on the computer telling it what the rules of grammar are. It's not perfect. You're gonna be able to make your own decisions as to what's appropriate or not. But it gives you pause and allows you to take a look and clean things up. I think it's a big benefit if you go through and do these. You don't have to accept each one, but it does flag the issues. So there we are with grammar and spell checking. The third thing that Grammarly does is plagiarism checking, and you might wonder why plagiarism checking is so important. Well, if you are say, hiring somebody to do some writing for you, they can just be with all of the documents that are available online, they can be copying and pasting content from another document, giving it to you, selling it to you, and then you're publishing it, thinking it's something that you paid for, but somebody else has actually written. That's one scenario. Or you might accidentally have copy and pasted something from a document, put it into one of your documents, not recognize that as you've written through the other document that you've got that piece of plagiarized copy in your document, and you might accidentally publish it without knowing, something that you probably wouldn't want to do. Certainly if you're a student, you wanna make sure that all of your copy is your original copy and that it's not being copied from some other site. I've got a document here from CBC. I just went out and tried to find something that wasn't too politically sensitive. And this is a news post that my local broadcaster, my national broadcaster here in Canada did on microplastics. So let's take this sentence here, or this couple of paragraphs here. Let's just copy it, and let's go in and let's create a new document in Grammarly with that content. I'm gonna go New Document. I'm gonna paste it in. Now, hopefully, CBC's writers are very good. Now, notice, once I paste in the copy, Grammarly asks me a bunch of questions that allows me to classify the copy for the audience because depending on what you're writing for, there could be a different temperature of copy or different timbre that you want in your copy. So this is for a General audience, but it could also be for Knowledgeable or Expert. The formality is Neutral as opposed to Formal or Informal. So if you're, say, writing a blog post or something like that, you could say, it's informal and to a general audience and it's casual. You can set the criteria here. But this is a news post. So I think it should be fairly down the middle. It should be all straightforward. So let's set that as the goals for this document and then it will help us attain those goals as it gives us feedback. Now, actually, it found a lot more mistakes than I would have expected. But take a look down here in the bottom. It found this sentence here, The World Health Organization did not recommended routing monitoring for, so they actually have a typo, I think it's a typo, that they put in here where they said recommended instead of recommend. And let's see what Grammarly suggests for this sentence. So I click here, and it says, that it recommends that we, that's kind of meta, isn't it? That we change the word recommended to recommend. And we can do that. There we go. So it's changed that. There we go. Sorry, CBC, I didn't mean to throw you under the bus. But you can see that you've got some fairly long sentences in here, and if you were editing this, you might well take a look at the things that Grammarly is pointing out here. But here's the thing that I really wanted to show you. Right down here we have plagiarism. By the way, you can, should you choose to pay extra, send any document to real proofreaders if the machine learning isn't good enough for you. That's an option. We're not gonna look at that right now. Instead, we're gonna take a look at this plagiarism. And it goes through now, and it checks the web, millions of documents, and it comes, oh, look at this. It comes back 99%. Tells us right way, it's given us the proper feedback. This is plagiarized. 14% of it matches this source, which obviously CBC copied from the World Health Organization, I suppose, but the rest of it all comes from this source here, 88%, which was actually in the Irish Times ironically as we take a look at it. So we see that this entire document was copied from somewhere else. Now, if you are writing a blog post and you are citing other people's content in your blog post, this gives you the great opportunity to just be able to click on this, and it creates a reference link where you can then paste it in. Now, this isn't APA or Chicago citation level for papers. This is fine for web publishing, making sure that you acknowledge who you're referring to from the content as you've created your own post or your own content. But it does protect us in a variety of different ways. First, if we accidentally are incorporating somebody's content that we shouldn't, it gives us, it allows us to nip that in the bud. And if we are gonna incorporate somebody else's content, it allows us to properly accredit their work on our document. So if we boil things back and take a look at what is included with Grammarly, in the free version, you have the spell and grammar checking. In the paid version, you have the readability, which is all of those things as far as what the general audience is gonna be, what the tone you want your content to be, and it offers more suggestions. And recognize that Grammarly, these features in Grammarly are evolving. Machine learning is just that. It's constantly learning. It's constantly improving, and it's today far better than it was three years ago, which is far better than it was three years before that. So it's a constantly improving environment having these spell and grammar checkers working with us. They are constantly adding more value to our writing, but it also includes with the premium version the plagiarism checking, which is, I think, an ideal tool, especially for students, but for all of us who wanna make sure that the copy that we're producing is properly cited and that people are acknowledged for the work that they do. Grammarly's cost is as I mentioned, I think I mentioned off the top, if you're paying monthly, it's fairly expensive. It's $30 a month. But if you purchase an annual subscription, it's basically $140 a year. That's what I pay myself, and I consider it to be good value. Try the free version. If you like it, and if you think the additional features might be of benefit to you, you consider upgrading. But for now, just try the free version, you will be surprised I think with how quickly you come to rely on Grammarly support as you're communicating on the web in all of the different social platforms in communication tools that we use online. Actually we take a look at their website, as you scroll through their website, one of the things I like 'cause they talk about the different areas that we end up using it, in here, in Email and Messaging, in Documents and Projects like Slack and other areas, and, of course, in Social Media. Those are places that we communicate. Those are the places that we write. Those are the places that we make mistakes. Grammarly can help us avoid those mistakes. Check out the links below so you can check out Grammarly for yourself. I hope you found today's video useful. Looking forward to your comments. I know, some of you are gonna say that we should just be better spellers. I'm trying, we're all trying. But Grammarly is a big help for me. Looking forward to what you have to say about it, whether or not you use it, and if it helps you as well. Til next time, I am Steve Dotto. Have fun storming the castle!
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