PSA

It's hard to find photos for posts about writing. But don't my glasses make me look extra writerly? I think so.

(Note: This PSA is actually a sponsored post by Grammarly.com, but all opinions are my own.)

I use Grammarly's plagiarism checker because it's so exCITEing.

(See what I did there? Writing humor. Never gets old.)

I have to admit, when a representative from Grammarly contacted me and asked me to try out the product, I was a little skeptical. I mean, I write and edit for a living. But after running a couple of my articles and blog posts through it, I'm totally sold. I'll be a user for a long time.

You could describe Grammarly.com as SpellCheck on steroids, but that's not giving it nearly enough credit. When you put your writing into the checker, it's not just looking for misspellings. It tears through your writing with all the fervor of a professional editor (and works much more quickly). It checks for comma splices, verb use, split infinitives, agreement errors, pronoun-noun agreement, use of articles—on and on and on. You can set it to check for certain things based on the type of writing you're doing—academic, business, casual, technical, creative and so on. And as I mentioned before, it has a plagiarism checker.

The first time I used it, I threw it a softball. I deliberately copied and pasted a couple paragraphs from the Internet into the middle of my article, just to see if the plagiarism checker picked it up. It did, easily. So I gave it a cleaner copy of the same article. It still picked up errors. I pride myself on giving all of my writing a pretty clean edit, but I don't have a deep enough understanding of the seriously technical grammar stuff to write completely flawlessly. Fortunately, Grammarly does. 

And it doesn't just point out when you've made an error. It tells you why it's wrong and how to fix it. So by using Grammarly, I'm actually becoming a better writer. 

As far as the negative aspects go, there aren't many. There were a couple minor errors it didn't pick up (I wrote "frosts's" when I meant "frost's" in an article, for example, and it didn't catch it). But they say Grammarly is meant to be a second set of eyes, so they never promised to catch everything. And it picked up a heck of a lot more than I could have on my own.

I tried Grammarly.com this week just so I could tell you guys about it. But now I'm a believer.