#4 Productivity Tools- Grammarly

Make the AI work for you; don’t create using the AI.

Photo by Jon Asato on Unsplash

This is part of an article series based on “7 Article Topics that will keep you writing forever” by JaffaBranding. I’d encourage you to give JaffaBranding a follow. Also, if you’d like to read the original piece, it is linked below. Today’s article is based on his advice about writing a “lesson”.

[embed]7 Article Topics That Will Keep You Writing Forever When it comes to creating new content ideas, we can often find ourselves staring mindlessly on an empty page.medium.com

The Lesson of AI Grammar Checkers

My writing process is usually simple; I draft on a paper in a notebook. Some of my notebooks are “fancy” while others are just the plain old school notebooks you are used to. I can handwrite things faster than I can type so I like just jamming my thoughts down. Then, my first “draft” is to move that to the computer.

Then I transfer those ideas to google docs. Then I type away and add and subtract.

Finally, I run my work through grammarly. I do a line-by-line edit and check for mistakes.

It never feels like enough and the AI suggestions often attempt to change my voice in a negative way. Let’s discuss grammarly.

[embed]#3 Lessons- My first days of school A Lesson in Identificationmedium.com

My Love/Hate Relationship with Grammarly “Free”

First, I do love how the tool is free.

AI writing tools like grammarly are really not interested in your voice. They want to homogenize text, taking into account grammar rules. (Grammarly hates that I use the word “really”. But I like the word “really”. And I like starting sentences with conjunctions.) You have to use grammarly as a tool and not as an ultimate authority.

Let’s look at this image. This is my usage of grammarly, mid-check up.

When you use the “free version”, grammarly really pushes you to the premium version. The premium version costs $12USD a month. The “business” version costs $15 USD a month.

The advantages to using the premium version is more for usage errors. For example, the “change the word” suggestions could be helpful. Of course, you could just use a free online thesaurus.

The “rephrase” suggestions are also nice. But again, it could greatly impact your voice.

Looking at the image above, in the upper right, you can see an “overall score”. To this day I’m still not sure what that means. But I do know that my writing always seems to be, “overall” between an 83 and an 88 after I finish my grammarly revisions.

My Final Verdict

Using grammarly, especially the free version, can help you catch mistakes that MS Word or Google docs does not catch. Revising and making edits will always help your writing.

While I am not married to grammarly, for now, it seems to be the best AI tool I have found to help catch any final mistakes and typos.

I’d recommend giving it a try.

[embed]#2 Story- The Wiffle Ball Continuing my work with the “endless ideas” postmedium.com

Follow me on Twitter at @authorrudylb and check out my other writings at www.rudylb.com. My debut novel “Principle Jones” is available for purchase. You can also follow my sports writing on Behind the Buck Pass where I am a contributor. “Be good, do good things!”