Hello everyone! Today I have a slightly different post for you. I wanted to talk about a program that I’ve been using lately to check for spelling and grammar issues while writing blog posts. It’s called Grammarly, and it’s really helped with the quality of my posts. If you’re a book blogger too, I highly recommend Grammarly to you. Keep reading to find out why.
I recently became an affiliate with Grammarly, but the opinions in this post are all my own. I actually used Grammarly long before I became an affiliate, as you’ll see below.
- I’ve gotten so used to seeing that green logo among my browser extensions!
How I found Grammarly
While I had often heard about Grammarly via internet ads, I didn’t actually try it until recently. I work at the circulation desk at my school’s library, where there are two computers used by all of the student works. I guess that someone installed Grammarly to the browser on one of the computers one day, and that was my introduction to it! I would be busy writing emails or working on assignments or blog posts and Grammarly would highlight any errors I made, which was quite helpful and made my writing look more professional. I actually started to miss it when working on my personal computer, so I installed it and never looked back!
Why I use it
You might be thinking “Why would an English major like you need a spelling/grammar checker?” Well, I think the fact that I am an English major makes Grammarly even more useful for me. While it’s true that I can copyedit and proofread all day long, the first draft of anything is bound to have errors, my own work included. While writing most of my blog posts and emails to publishers, I end up misspelling the simplest of words and sometimes forgetting punctuation, usually because I type so fast to get my ideas out on the page.
While some browsers or operating systems have a basic spell check built-in, I don’t think any of them work as well as this program. I have the browser add-on installed, so it spellchecks on any page of the internet, from WordPress to Google Drive to Facebook! In addition to the Chrome browser app, there’s also Grammarly for Windows, Grammarly for Microsoft Office, and the site itself, where you can upload documents. However, I find the Chrome add-on to be powerful enough for all of my needs, as it offers real-time suggestions! (It’s made like 5 suggestions for me since starting this section!)
Also, let’s talk about the price. Grammarly is FREE! As a broke college student, that’s very important to me. Of course, with the free version, you’ll be missing out on advanced features such as a plagiarism checker and tools that will check for more advanced things like inconsistent tone, impoliteness, and sentence structure issues, but it’s a good place to get started, and you can always upgrade later if you need to.
Why it’s good for Book Bloggers
I think the main reason why Grammarly is good for book bloggers (or any blogger or any person, really) is that it helps us maintain a standard of well-edited posts. As a blogger, I’m obviously publishing content on the internet that anyone can see. An article or review full of typos is not the type of content that I want to represent myself with, so Grammarly comes in handy with making sure my writing seems polished.
I think it’s especially helpful when writing emails to publishers or authors. If you’re sending out an ARC review request email, the last thing you need is a glaring spelling or grammar error!
As I said earlier, Grammarly has a browser add-on in Google Chrome, so it’s easy to use on any blogging site, including WordPress, Tumblr, and more. Just start typing and it’ll catch anything. After a while, it just becomes part of your normal writing experience, and you’ll feel weird using a computer without it.
I think that’s about it for Grammarly! Whether you’re a blogger, student, or just someone who posts any sort of content on the internet, I recommend Grammarly to you. Since it’s free and easy to install, there’s no reason to not give it a try.
You can make your free account here to get started!
Thanks for reading!
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Thanks for the suggestion. Definitely sounds like it could save some time editing my posts before publishing.
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It’s really helpful! As I was writing this post it kept catching all of my little mistakes, like not hyphenating words or putting double punctuation!
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Right? Or my thing is missing one letter in a word. Ugh, so frustrating!
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