Grammarly: I’m Just Not Sure

Krissie is the last stages of copy editing her book and wanted to know if I knew of a way to get a word frequency list in Word.  (I don’t.)  One of the things I tried was this new app called Grammarly which is being advertised all over the place. Essentially, you download it into your computer, and it lurks in the background, leaping out at you with red lines whenever you type something wrong anywhere.  I tried it on a Word doc, thought “Hell, Word does all of this already” and deleted the app.  Except it didn’t delete.  

I’m sure if I went back in, I could figure out how to get it out of my laptop, but I’m starting to rely on it because it’s not just for Word.  Turns out, it also checks the posts I write in WordPress and, even more helpful, any comment I write in any comment box anywhere.  Given how remarkably easy it is to screw up a comment, that’s a real plus.  Plus the fixes for a mistake are easy and elegant.  

For example, if I make a mistake, Grammarly underlines it in red; when I click on the red, a box opens up and gives me three choices: click on the spelling Grammarly likes, add my spelling to the dictionary, and a third choice that offers a more detailed explanation of why it redlined your word.  So I can fix a word I’ve misspelled with one click, or I can enter my version into the dictionary with a different click (which I just did for “Jeo” which Grammarly really wants to change to “Joe.”  I’m not completely sure that part’s working, but then I did delete the app).  

As I said, I really like this.  But there’s something about having this program lurking underneath everything I do that’s a little unnerving.  Plus it really, really wants me to upgrade to its paid version (the basic app is free), and I’m just not that interested right now..

Anybody else here using this app?  What do you think?

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