You spent hours sweating over your latest email. It was as near perfect as it could be.
After proofreading it for the umpteenth time, you finally hit send and your email is now on its merry way, hurtling through cyberspace until it lands in the right inbox.
That's when you spot the spelling mistake.
It's happened to all of us.
The universal rules of email writing and social media posts demand that you make at least a couple of errors.
Why is it so easy to miss simple mistakes? Because you are too familiar with your work.
When you've read something a dozen times, you start seeing the words as they should be. This makes it really hard to spot mistakes.
Lucky for us, help is out there. You can hire an editor to go over your work before you hit publish or you could use software to help you stay on the right side of the grammar purists (if you want to).
Today, I want to share two of my favorite editing services– Grammarly and Editorr.
Grammarly is editorial software that can help proofread your document for grammatical and spelling errors.
Editorr is a proofreading service that connects you to a pool of professional editors and proofreaders that are available 24/7.
Let's see what these two handy tools have to offer.
Grammarly
Grammarly is an AI-powered software that checks your spelling and grammar. You can install it straight to your Chrome browser and use it to check your work as you go.
Grammarly can spell-check your Tweets, Facebook posts, and Blog articles as you write them.
You can also write or import whole articles into Grammarly's own clean writing processor. It works right in your browser– to access it just log into your free Grammarly account and add a new document.
The interface is really clean, making it great for writing.
Once you've finished writing, click on the Grammarly assistant in the top right-hand corner. You can then go through the suggested corrections and pick the ones you like.
You aren't always going to agree with Grammarly and that's ok— just pick the suggestions that make sense for you and ignore the rest.
And it's not all about spelling and grammar either. Grammarly's Insights give you extra information about your document.
You can see:
- The number of words, characters, and sentences in the document.
- The reading time and the speaking time (great for scripts and VSLs).
- A vocabulary review including the percentage of unique and rare words.
- A readability review looking at factors like word length, sentence length, and the readability score.
Grammarly's free option is a great way to get started with the tool. If you want more in-depth help, you can try the Premium version. It comes with a lot of extra feature including a really handy plagiarism checker.
One of the downsides of Grammarly is that it doesn't support Google Docs so if you do the majority of your work there, you'll need to import your document into Grammarly in order to check it.
editorr
What if you are ready to pass on the editing and proofreading to someone else? Editorr can help with that.
The service connects you with editors and proofreaders waiting to give your document a final polish.
There are no subscriptions or hidden fees– you are charged per word. If you know how much editing you need, you can buy a package and save some cash.
Editorr connects you to a real-life editor in minutes that can help your writing shine.
Improving your writing skills
Every great writer needs a great editor.
If you are a DIYer, Grammarly is a good approximation and a great way to check your writing for errors quickly.
If you want to work with a real human editor, Editorr can help you meet the one– or at least connect you to a lot of talented folks.
Do you have a favorite editing tool? Let me know in the comments!
Until next time,
Have fun storming the castle!
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