The one thing I struggle with the most when it comes to writing is grammar. I hate it. It is a thorn in my side that keeps poking me as I write, demanding I double-check everything for correct tenses, unnecessary words and all those other things that some people thrive on pointing out (you know who you are). Therefore, I mostly take an imaginary dose of painkiller, ignore the pain and keep writing my stories the way I like to. Once I am all done, well, then I face the uncomfortable and laborious task of checking whether the thorn in my side was real or imaginary.

I know from reading plenty of stories here on Wattpad that I'm not the only one that struggles with this. I see this especially in stories by those that have English as a second language, like myself, but also with plenty of native English speakers. In some instances, these grammatical problems make a story so hard to read and distract from the story the writer is trying to tell. The truly tragic aspect of this is that few people actually take the time to point out these problems and instead complement writing that honestly is awful.

My point is...poor grammar can push your readers away.

BUT WAIT, YOU CAN DO IT!

The one thing I firmly believe is that we all have a story to tell. You, reading this at this very moment, have a story that's unique to you, whether it be sci-fi, romance, adventure, vampire or something completely different. Yet, you may, just as I have, struggle with how to get that story out there without the distracting grammatical problems that so often haunt us. Although I'm no grammatical expert, I'm hoping to at least be able to share some of the tips I have found to work for me, with the hope that it'll help you too.

Anyway, before I bore you to death, let's get to the point: being the techy guy that I am, I tend to look for solutions that can do this for me automatically, even if it costs me a bit. This past year, I found several solutions that have helped me improve my writing and cut down on my editing time. I felt it only appropriate I share some of this with you, my fellow Wattpad writers.

THERE IS A BUT...

Note that these tools, especially software-based ones, will not be perfect. They will not catch everything. In fact, sometimes the suggestions for fixing errors are flat out wrong. Those are the instances where you will have to rely on your own knowledge or ask someone that understands grammar better than you. Quite often, I think, if it sounds wrong, it probably is.  Just remember, software isn't perfect and won't catch everything. Don't tell me I didn't warn you.

LET'S DIVE IN

Having said that, lets cast off and start our journey. This chapter will cover an app called Grammarly. What you'll read below is a deep dive into this app, what it is and how it works.

1) What is Grammarly?
2) How do you use it?
3) How well does it work?

WHAT IS GRAMMARLY?

Grammarly is, in a nutshell, an app that analyzes your writing and suggests fixes for a variety of grammatical issues while you type. Some of the issues Grammarly can identify are:

- Critical grammar and spelling errors. These are the basic features of the free and premium versions.
- Punctuation, context and sentence structure (premium only).
- Suggestions for enhancing your vocabulary (premium only).
- Style checks specific genres (premium only). As a blogger, this is a highly valuable feature that allows you to use a different set of rules for fiction writing compared to writing a blog post or an academic paper.
- Plagiarism detector (premium only). If you are writing a paper for school, you will appreciate this. It will help ensure your writing is your own.

There are also other features like personal dictionaries. You can add words you don't want to be flagged, thereby avoiding false positives (awesome if you are creating your very own fantasy world).

HOW TO USE GRAMMARLY

Grammarly can be used in a variety of different ways, depending on what your preference is.

The desktop app (for Windows) is text editor on steroids specifically for grammar checking. Type your text or copy and paste from Scrivener, for example, and watch as Grammarly points out the errors in a panel to the right of your text. The web version works the same way.  In fact, any documents you create and save in the desktop version will appear in the web version. Because of other similarities, I would guess that the desktop version is just a wrapper around the web version. Regardless, it works well. 

I should point out that the editor is rather basic and as a result, you won't find formatting options, such as font, bold, underline and so on. Although some may see this as a drawback, most writers are likely to use other apps like Scrivener and Word for formatting anyway. In my view, it is just as well that these options are not included. It would make the editor something it's not trying to be.

The Chrome plugin (screenshot below) is a slick option that lets Grammarly analyze everything you are writing in your browser. Everything you write into a text field in your browser is examined for errors. A little green G is displayed in the bottom right corner of the text field if everything is fine. If any errors are identified, a little notification is shown to indicate how many errors have been found. Simple errors are displayed inline in the text with a red underline. A popup will show you details about the error if you hover on the word that's labeled as erroneous.  More complex errors are available by opening popup panel that gives information about more advanced mistakes. It is fantastic if you're a blogger that spend hours on your Wordpress site writing content or, as in the case of many of you, you are writing here on Wattpad. In fact, if you write primarily on Wattpad and you use Google Chrome, Grammarly is a great way to stay on top of your grammar.

There is also an add-on for Microsoft Word that adds the Grammarly functionality to Word. Just as with the native desktop app and the Chrome plugin, once enabled, the Word add-on shows potential errors in a panel on the right side of your document. A ribbon section at the top of the screen lets you enable and disable the various error checks as well as see the number of errors in the available categories.

Although Word isn't a go-to app for me in my writing, the very fact that Grammarly integrates so well is enough for me to consider using Word for my writing or, at the very least, the Grammarly editor.

 It does have some limitations that I'll cover a little further down in this post but if you're using a mobile device as your primary method of writing here on Wattpad, it's a good way to seamlessly check your grammar as you write.

WHAT ABOUT A MOBILE VERSION?

Not too long ago, a mobile version of Grammarly also became available on Android and iOS devices as a keyboard. It's a clever solution that allows Grammarly to work while you're typing on your screen in the same way it does on your computer. T

The mobile version is essentially a third-party keyboard solution. As you're writing your text, it checks what you're writing for errors or, alternatively, it checks all the text already written if you open up an existing text file. Below are a few screenshots of how the Android version works directly with the Android Wattpad app (I use an Android phone so my experiences will be based on the Android version).

As you can see, the keyboard is relatively simple. Right above it, you can see the number of errors and you go directly to any particular error by clicking on it.

Here's a punctuation correction.

Then, a verb correction.

Here, Grammarly suggested I use another word because I've already used the word flashlights quite a bit. In this particular case, I disagreed with the suggestions and dismissed the error.

Finally, another suggestion to use another word, in this case also ignored by me.

As you can see, the corrections provided are by no means perfect. However, from what I can tell, the mobile version checks for most of the same things the desktop version does. One major difference is that you can't set the app to a specific document style (novel, paper, essay etc.), which can make a pretty significant difference when you check a document using the desktop version. However, having said that, if you're a writer that primarily uses Wattpad to write your stories, the Grammarly keyboard is still a great solution to ensures that your writing is as error-free as is a piece of software can make it.

BUT...

Although the Grammarly keyboard works great for checking grammar, as an Android keyboard it is in all honesty quite annoying. It doesn't include the Swype-type writing most modern keyboards now have. Nor does it include things like quick access to citation marks, question marks, and other common symbols by holding one of the regular characters on the keyboard. This means that for something simple as an exclamation mark, you have to swap to the symbol layout, hit the '!' and then swap back to the regular keyboard to continue typing. That's three clicks instead of one long-press. This is, in my opinion, something that's going to be a huge source of frustration. I know it already has been for me. Yet, at the same time, switching keyboards is easy enough that I'll tolerate it if it means I can publish a new chapter without having to run home to my computer and run it through the desktop app of Grammarly.

TESTING GRAMMARLY

Of course, to really see how an app like this holds up, it needs to be tested. I decided to use a chapter of my short story The Descent as a test subject. At the time of writing this post originally (early summer of 2017), I had just finished the first round of editing for this story and the only error correction applied to the story had been that of the spell checker in Scrivener. At just about 2,000 words long, it was the perfect candidate for a Grammarly test.

Note that for this particular test, I used the desktop/web version of Grammarly.

To do a test like this (or for real), you open a new document and paste your text into the editor (or, just write using the editor as if you were using Word or Scrivener), Grammarly takes a few seconds to analyze your writing before it spits out the problems.

Grammarly rates your writing on a scale up to 100. The errors are divided into several categories which are scored based on the errors associated with your writing. The total score is deducted from the perfect 100. The categories include spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, style and vocabulary enhancements.

So how did my story do?

The initial score for The Descent? 81 out of 100 points.  

Not terrible, right? Of course, the question now is whether what Grammarly interprets as errors actually are errors. You may recall from the mobile section above that what Grammarly considers an error may not always be. Here's the first set of errors:

On the spelling portion, I think I did pretty good. I did not expect many of these errors since Scrivener identified most of these before I even used Grammarly. Most of the misspelled words identified by Grammarly consisted primarily of missed hyphens, words like "three-dimensional" for example.

The "confused words" check identifies words that may not be misspelled, but they are not the correct words for that particular context. For example, "though" instead of "thought."

The mixed dialects portion goes back to one of the settings you can change in Grammarly. Do you write British English or American English? Color or colour? I am not surprised this came up since I grew up in Scandinavia where British English was taught in school. That's also an important setting to set appropriately before you begin to use Grammarly.

Surprisingly, the grammar portion only gave me four error points. I usually expect my grammar to be worse, considering English is a second language for me.

Most of my punctuation errors ended up being missing commas. Imagine that. The sentence structure errors showed me missing words or words that maybe should be in a different order. Again, I am grateful that the error count it is low. 

There was, however, one instance related to character dialogue when the correction that was proposed wasn't necessary. It happened to be a dialogue sentence. 

When writing fiction, and dialogue, in particular, you can't expect your main characters to know proper grammar. Neither can you expect a computer to know exactly how a character is supposed to converse. The point here is that if you run into errors in character dialogue, it may not need to be corrected.

The style portion is a section where I expected to find more errors. I know from using other apps that I tend to "misuse" passive voice now and then. Grammarly confirmed this once again. Add that to something for me to improve on.

The vocabulary enhancements are also useful. These notifications are not technically incorrect and are, in my opinion, more there as a heads up that "Hey, maybe try to use a different word." If you write fiction, this is one of those important things to be on the lookout for. Below is an example as well as a suggested synonym to use.

Finally, the plagiarism checker determined that 2% of my short story exist elsewhere online and should be reviewed. I don't think I would worry too much about this checker. What I found was that in most cases, the "existing" sentences were eight or nine-word sentence fragments that are so common that I am not surprised they appear elsewhere online. It was interesting though to see that even Reddit shows up as a reference point. 

It should be noted that the plagiarism checker is turned off by default and frankly, my personal opinion is that you can keep it that way in most cases.

WHAT IS THIS PREMIUM THING?

As I mentioned initially, most of the advanced features are not free. Sure, there is a free version of Grammarly, even on the Android keyboard version. It will catch the most basic stuff and because it works so seamlessly behind the scenes, I would use that no matter what, just to not get embarrassed by the simple stuff.

The cost of the premium features, which covers what I've covered in this review, starts at $30/month. You can buy a quarterly option for $20/month, and there is also an annual option for $12/month. However, what I've noticed is that there are quite often sales that can shave of as much as 50% of the price, which suddenly makes even the annual option affordable. In the end, that's what I ended up doing and I now use the premium version of Grammarly for all writing I do.

VERDICT AND RECOMMENDATION

It's been said that the truth of the pudding is in the eating (I'm still not sure exactly sure what pudding has to do with anything). In other words, does Grammarly live up to the hype? In my case, did Grammarly make my writing any better?

Yes, it did.

For starters, I was able to correct many surprising errors. I know that many of the errors that Grammarly pointed out I would never have caught myself. By pointing these out to me, Grammarly has helped me see some of the weaknesses in my writing (passive voice, repeat words, punctuation, etc.) that I need to work on. Although Grammarly may not be able to teach me how to properly address this in my writing beyond brief examples, at least I know what my weaknesses are. I know what to focus on. That's a good start.

 Interestingly, not long after I posted the chapter I used for the test above on Wattpad, one of my devoted readers quickly found a handful of additional problems for me to correct. Such experiences tell me that it doesn't matter how many apps you use to check your grammar, they will not catch everything. So, don't expect them to!    

For you Wattpad writers, especially if you use Google Chrome, Grammarly is a great way to improve your writing in a way that happens seamlessly as you write. Because you don't actually have to open another browser window or another app, it's easy to just write and feel good that what you write will be at least in a relatively good shape when you click publish.

Should you try Grammarly? At the very least, you should use the free version. If you're a grammar wizard and are comfortable with your skills, maybe you don't need it. However, my opinion based on my use of the app is that if nothing else, it's a good safety net to have, especially if you're writing to be published or to make money. If you're on the fence, give it a shot for a month. Use a few chapters from a manuscript or a short story. See how it performs. Perhaps compare a draft to the one you completed after feedback from a proofreader or editor.

My take? It's well worth it.

You can sign up for Grammarly on http://www.grammarly.com or download the Android keyboard from Google Play.

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What do you think? Have you tried Grammarly? Did it work well for you or was it a waste of time and money? What other tools do you use that have helped you identify some of your grammatical deficiencies? I'd love to know. I'll be covering other apps with similar concepts in the future.