3 Grammarly Features You Cannot Live Without
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Before you submit anything you have written, having someone—or something—check your work is a must. After all, no one can perfectly edit or proofread their own content, whether that is an email, report, landing page, blog post, ebook, or sales copy.
Grammarly is there to help improve your writing and be the second set of eyes you need.
Beyond just checking your spelling—like when you should have ‘jewelry’ instead of ‘jewellery’ for your U.S. readers—the writing tool can also ensure the tone of your content is spot-on, check whether your content is original and you didn’t accidentally copy something you read, and improve your grammar.
3 Grammarly Features You Must-Have
Grammarly’s three features you can’t live without are their grammar checker, tone detector, and plagiarism checker. I’ll dive deep into each and show you how they work, plus I’ll discuss how each feature can help you.
Grammar Checker
The Grammar Checker is available on free Grammarly and Grammarly Premium and Business; however, in the free version, you only get basic corrections while the paid subscriptions give you advanced suggestions.
In addition to checking spelling and punctuation, Grammarly’s real-time editor also checks your grammar. The writing tool compares and analyzes your writing to the rules and patterns of good writing with the help of its cutting-edge algorithms.
The AI “reads” every sentence and makes suggestions for how you can improve it, whether it is in terms of eliminating or revising sentence fragments, fixing egg-corns (bread and breakfast vs bed and breakfast), using a strong vocabulary term, or changing a verb tense.
How the Grammar Checker Works
This feature from Grammarly works in real-time when you type or it can check your content for you if you add it to the app. Any incorrect grammar is underlined and the AI editor provides you with suggested corrections you can either accept or reject.
While Grammarly is fairly accurate, it isn’t advised to accept all of their suggestions, and the explanations provided can help you when you are unsure of whether you should go with the suggestion.
How Grammarly’s Grammar Checker Helps You
Incorrect grammar can skew your message. Correct grammar, on the other hand, aids clear communication and helps you convey meaning, which thus ensures your content is correctly understood by your audience. Good grammar is important because it helps you further cement yourself as a professional.
Tone Detector
Have you ever written something and worried whether your tone matches how the reader will interpret it. After all, it is much easier to identify tone when you are speaking to someone as you have gestures, cues, and facial expressions to help you. These are missing in text communication.
Did you want the blog post to be confident but were worried it might sound just a tad bit unsure? Or did you want your email to be polite but were worried it might come across as rude with the urgency it carried?
Enter Grammarly’s Tone Detector so you don’t have to worry about striking the right tone for your content anymore:
How Can You Use the Tone Detector?
Currently and at the time of writing, the Tone Detector from Grammarly Premium is in beta, meaning that the final round of testing and feedback is underway before the final product is released.
You can access the Tone Detector from the Grammarly browser extension that is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. If you haven’t yet, install the Grammarly extension in your preferred browser. Open the site where you are writing, such as Gmail. The Tone Detector needs a minimum of 150 characters (between 20-30 words) to activate.
Access tone suggestions from the floating sidebar. Tone suggestions are underlined in purple. Click on one of these and options to improve your tone will appear to match the tone goals you set.
Alternatively, click on “Predictions” at the bottom of the sidebar. This takes you to the Tone Detector where you will see a list of suggestions to improve your tone.
How Grammarly’s Tone Detector Helps You
Unsuccessful communication doesn’t lead you anywhere good: Your readers may notice spelling, grammar, punctuation errors in your content, read a paragraph for something that could be said in a sentence or two, or the tone is off, leading to miscommunication.
I’m sure you want to communicate effectively, and tone is one of the critical aspects that need to hit the mark. What and how you say something are equally as important.
Compare “You are so stupid. How could you have made a mistake?” with “I picked up an error. Can you please rectify this?” The second is much more respectful and will help you build and/or maintain the relationships you have, both personally and professionally.
As such, the Tone Detector feature from Grammarly helps you:
- Revise a message or content when it doesn’t come across how you meant it to
- Ensure your audience reacts appropriately to the intended tone
- Feel confident
- Make, build, and preserve connections
Plagiarism Checker
There is a lot of plagiarized content out there and not all of it is malicious. Sometimes you read something, go to your PC to write later, and think you came up with a brilliant sentence, phrase, or idea.
You’d be surprised by how much your brain can and does remember without you being consciously aware of it. However, unintentional plagiarism has serious consequences, and you will want to avoid this.
As such, using a plagiarism checker is a must to ensure your content is 100% original, and where you need citations, a plagiarism check can ensure you’ve identified and cited these instances properly.
Grammarly’s Plagiarism Checker is a feature you need.
How Does Grammarly’s Plagiarism Checker Work?
The Plagiarism Checker compares your content against 16 billion web pages as well as the academic databases of ProQuest. Once you’ve run the Plagiarism Checker, it will show you duplicate content and from where the matching content originates.
Grammarly Premium then also highlights the passages that may need citations (for academic work or ebooks) and gives you the references so you can credit your sources.
How Grammarly’s Plagiarism Checker Helps You
This key feature from Grammarly can save you time, help you avoid writing errors, and ensure you keep your reputation intact.
You can save time and avoid errors because the Plagiarism Checker from Grammarly will provide you with proof that your content is original and it will highlight any duplicate content it found while it ran its comparison to other texts. It also finds those very generic phrases and sentences that are boring and can benefit from a rewrite.
So, how to avoid plagiarism? As mentioned above, the tool also helps you identify content that needs to be cited and referenced, and even more helpful, Grammarly gives you these resources, making it easy to cite and reference (instead of you Googling to find where you got the info from).
Grammarly helps ensure your reputation as the author of your work is not tarnished; if you write books, for example, and Amazon takes plagiarized work seriously. If they find cases of plagiarism in your work, your account will be reviewed and possibly deactivated—for good!
Grammarly’s Key Features FAQs
What can Grammarly do?
Grammarly can help you check for common spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors while also teaching you why their suggestions may be correct (may because no algorithm-powered writing checker can be 100% accurate).
The writing tool, should you opt for the paid version (Grammarly Premium), offers you more. With Premium, Grammarly also checks and helps improve your content for tone, clarity, and conciseness, and it ensures your content is tailored for your audience.
Grammarly can also check for plagiarism (available only on its Premium and Business subscriptions) and you can create specific style guides with its Business plan.
How can I access the Plagiarism Check on Grammarly?
The Plagiarism Check feature on Grammarly is not available on their free version; you will need to either subscribe to the Premium or Business plan. The Premium plan costs $11.66 for one user per month on the annual subscription, while the Business plan is $12.50 per team member per month, also on the per annum billing option.
What is better than Grammarly?
Not many other writing tools are better than Grammarly, but it really does depend on how you use it and what features you need. Alternative tools to Grammarly for checking spelling, grammar, and punctuation are ProWritingAid, WhiteSmoke, and Ginger.
Not all of these alternatives check tone and plagiarism, so it is best to do some research or check out our Grammarly Business review article where we’ve compared these alternatives in a nice table.
The Final Verdict on Grammarly’s Must-Have Features
Clear communication is good communication, and this cannot always be achieved without some help.
To ensure your message is carried across the way you intended, you need to ensure that your spelling, grammar, punctuation, and tone are on the money. A plagiarism check can also go a long way to help ensure any information needing to be referenced is and any generic phrasing is either omitted or rephrased to improve reader engagement.
What is your must-have Grammarly feature? Share with us in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you.
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