Grammarly : Java Glossary

Grammarly is a web service that checks your grammar, e.g. spelling, consistency of voice, plural agreement, avoidance of trite phrases, plagiarism, commonly confused words, sentence fragments, faulty parallelism, word order, punctuation, wordiness, colloquial speech, formatting etc. I ran a couple of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) documents through it I had already proofread. It rated them both under 50% correct. Grammarly does 150 different checks. It uses advanced algorithms that take the context of each word into account. You use it either by pasting in to a web form or uploading a document with your browser and it lists its complaints. It is not an editor. However, there are also add-ins for Outlook and Word.

Unfortunately it does not work with Firefox-Youtube or in Thunderbird.

It supports .txt, .doc (word), .docx (LibreOffice), .rtf (rich text format). I suspect it also supports HTML.

Grammarly just provides you a list of suggested corrections. It does not make changes to your original document and give it back to you in the original format.

You can check up to 300 documents or 150,000 words in any 30-day period, or 100 documents or 50,000 words in any 24-hour period. If you revalidate the same document, that counts as another document. Grammarly is aimed at someone creating new documents each day. Mostly what I do is make small changes to a set of 9000 files. Even I just change a sentence or two I have to revalidate the whole document. It would soon blow the limit if I routinely ran Grammarly after any edits. It is quite expensive, per year. There is a free trial, but you must give your credit card number just to try it. There is a free version that works inside Chrome.

Advantages

• It catches spelling, and lets you correct by clicking a replacement.
• It catches missing commas.
• It catches missing question marks.
• It gives you a responsive editor to compose posts.

Disadvantages

• The free version pesters you many times a day to upgrade to the paid version.
• The free version works only in Chrome. It cannot help you with your email, text editing or word processing.
• It often gets confused about plurals, claiming verbs do not match when they do.
• Grammarly just provides list of suggested corrections. It does it actually make changes to your original document. You cannot configure it to automatically correct missing commas, spelling etc.

Outstanding Questions

• The answer to this question must be on the website somewhere, but I have not yet found it. What file formats does Grammarly Support? What are the file formats that I can upload/download? I presume HTML, Word, ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) text, UTF-8 text, Libre Office ODT. Are there others?
• Is there any way to sign up without a credit card? Many people, myself included, never use credit cards on the net. Sending a pile of signed blank cheques is more secure. Is there any way people like me can pay by PayPal or similar service, pre-cleared cheque, money order etc?

I think the Chrome add-in is free.