Grammarly Review 2019 (Pros / CONS ) | Catbot Reader - Hacking Tutorials

• PROS
  Fast and accurate grammar and spell check. Excellent interfaces across platforms. Premium writing style tools. Good mobile keyboard.
 
• CONS
  Expensive. No support for Office on Mac. No offline editing mode.
 
• BOTTOM LINE
  It costs a lot, but real-time spelling and grammar checker Grammarly is an excellent tool for improving your writing across a wide range of platforms.

Everyone, including professional writers, makes mistakes in their writing. Even when you get the basics down, hunting down higher-level grammar and style nuances can be overwhelming. Grammarly, which calls itself a writing assistant, can help out in those scenarios. This app for writers suggests spelling, grammar, and style changes in real time and can even edit for specific genres. Although its paid subscriptions are a bit expensive and the service does not work offline, Grammarly's wide range of supported platforms and ease of use make it well worth the cost.\\

Improving Grammar (Almost) Everywhere

Grammarly costs $29.95 per month, $59.95 per quarter, or $139.95 per year. If this price seems high, know that Grammarly frequently offers subscription discounts. For the price of entry, you get customized checks for different document types, a plagiarism filter, and a function to help diversify your vocabulary, among other extras. The latest feature for premium subscribers is a consistency check in the Grammarly Editor desktop application, which we discuss in a later section. Grammarly also offers a limited free version that checks for critical spelling and grammar errors. Grammarly's Business tier costs $15 per member per month and is billed on an annual basis. Grammarly offers native desktop clients for both Windows and macOS, browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. Grammarly is also usable on Android and iOS via a mobile keyboard app, which I discuss later. Grammarly now supports two other major writing platforms: Google Docs and Medium. While the Google Docs integration currently only works via the Chrome browser, both expansions are welcome updates and most users should now be able to use Grammarly on their preferred platform. Still, I would like to see Grammarly added to Office on the Mac, Apple's iWork Suite, and Libre Office for Linux users.

Getting Started and Security

Grammarly checks your writing against its database of content and style errors as well as anonymously collected data from its daily active users. The downside of this real-time model is that Grammarly requires an internet connection to work. In use, Grammarly underlines critical mistakes in red (spelling and basic grammar), and advanced errors in yellow (style and best practices), though the latter capability is limited to premium users. Hovering over any of the indicated words or phrases brings up the option to fix the error directly or read a more detailed explanation of the mistake. I appreciate the descriptions' clear language and use of sample sentences to illustrate mistakes. It's more detailed than what you get with the built-in grammar checkers of both Google Docs and Office 365. I also find the error count that Grammarly adds at the bottom of every document to be an efficient way of showing how much editing work I have left. However, you need to be aware of the potential privacy and security risks of Grammarly, since it actively checks everything you type. In 2018, Tavis Ormandy, a Google Security researcher, reported a vulnerability with how the Grammarly browser extensions handle auth tokens. Grammarly resolved the issue shortly after this release and noted that the vulnerability only had the potential to expose data saved in the Grammarly Editor.

Even though Grammarly handled the response well, you still must exercise extreme caution with software that can view and modify your input. That said, Grammarly does differ from a key logger in a few important ways. For instance, Grammarly requires your permission to access what you are writing and visually indicates when it is working. A company representative also told me that Grammarly "is blocked from accessing anything you type in text fields marked "sensitive," such as credit card forms or password fields." I still recommend you disable Grammarly for such sites in case they are not configured correctly, as well as for things like sensitive legal documents. Note that Grammarly's bug bounty program on HackerOne is available to the public and that Grammarly now maintains a page about its security practices.

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Grammarly Improves Your Writing

Grammarly's thoroughness when it comes to spelling, grammar, and style suggestions is its greatest strength. The premium version is a luxury at $29.95 per month, but writers of all kinds can benefit from adding Grammarly to their workflow. Although we would still like to see an offline mode and support for Microsoft Office on the Mac, recent additions, such as Google Docs support and new features for the desktop editor, make Grammarly easy to recommend.

A Useful Companion

I found myself using Grammarly quite a bit. You could argue that Grammarly encourages lazy writing and that's at least partially accurate, as some people will take advantage of its thorough checks without bothering to learn from the insight it provides. It's well suited for people actively looking to improve their writing but still caters to users who aren't aware that they need help. However, Grammarly's real value is its ability to highlight your most common mistakes and help you avoid them going forward. Occasionally, I did find the real-time edits distracting in my testing and disabled Grammarly so that I could finish typing a thought without being interrupted. Grammarly might be more useful during the revision portion of your writing process as a final check for errors and inconsistencies.

I was hard-pressed to find much of a difference between the free version of Grammarly and the built-in spelling, grammar, and style checker in the latest version of Microsoft Office. Both correctly identified spelling errors, convoluted phrases, and incorrect grammar usage. However, I found Grammarly's advanced editing checks, which help you clean up all the middling grammar tidbits, suggest alternatives to commonly used words, as well as provide contextual edits for the sake of clarity, highly useful. For example, Grammarly is a stickler for getting rid of unnecessary commas. Another clear benefit of Grammarly is that it works in more places across your workflow.

Occasionally, both Grammarly and Office make wrong suggestions, which proves that you still need to pay attention to edits instead of just mindlessly accepting them. For example, it suggested I add an article in a few places that didn't require one. Still, some users might not like the omission of an "Accept All" button strictly for some of the more rudimentary spacing and comma usage errors. Note that even authorities on grammar, such as AP, Merriam Webster, and Oxford sometimes disagree on some rules like hyphenation and capitalization, so no grammar-checking tool is perfect. For instance, Grammarly suggested I capitalize the word "kanban," since "it appears that the word kanban may be a proper noun in this context," even though Merriam Webster and Oxford do not do so.

Each week, Grammarly sends an email recapping your writing activity, called Grammarly Insights. This provided me some helpful information, such as the three most common errors I made, as well as metrics that mostly correspond with what the Insights tab shows from the desktop editor. It also highlighted some neat statistics, such as how many words it checked and how many unique words I used

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Mobile Keyboard

Grammarly's keyboard app is available on both Android and iOS devices. I tested the app on my Google Pixel running Android 9. As you might expect, the Grammarly keyboard helps you correct grammar and spelling errors as you go. It's useful for everything from writing emails to composing social media posts to editing long-form documents.

In Settings, you can select either the light or dark color theme, choose whether to show key borders and the number row or toggle vibration, sound, and popup on keypress. I like that you can even adjust the keyboard height on the screen. Grammarly looks very similar to Gboard, though it is missing a few key Gboard features. For example, Grammarly currently does not support swipe typing, though the company says it is working on adding that feature. It also lacks all of Gboard's extras that push you to Google services, such as web search and translation. That said, I appreciate the clean design and don't think feature parity should be Grammarly's goal. Power users may disagree.

As you type, Grammarly pops up suggestions and corrections automatically. You can swipe through and accept these changes with ease or hit the green Grammarly icon in the upper-left corner to check it again. If you tap on individual edits, Grammarly opens a card-based interface with more in-depth explanations. The experience is fluid, and it's easy to go through edits quickly. As in the app's desktop counterpart, the keyboard edits and suggestions are usually helpful and accurate, especially if you pay for the full version. The auto-correct for spelling is just as good as what you get with the standard keyboard, but its corrective grammar edits are its biggest appeal.

The keyboard settings are fairly robust. In addition to the appearance and behavior settings I already mentioned, Grammarly lets you change basic editing options. You can toggle auto-correction and auto-capitalization options, select a language preference (American, Australian, British, or Canadian English), and even allow it to suggest contact names as you type. The remaining sections let you give feedback, access the support portal, or switch accounts.