Writing an English text without a single flaw is a daunting, nearly impossible task. Until very recently, achieving it involved multiple revisions by writers, proofreaders and editors. Fortunately, automated grammar and writing style checkers like Grammarly emerged to make this process a lot easier. But is Grammarly Premium worth It? Is it necessary to pay for grammar checking software? In this post, we give our take.
Dragging out every single misspelling in any long English form is exceptionally challenging. You may think that a single mistake in a 2.000-word article is a small thing. Yet, those mistakes carry a substantial cost for your piece’s credibility, undermining the objective you are trying to achieve.
Even slight misspellings make you look like an amateur and may even command some readers’ anger. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to take your writing to the next level by singling out those grammar mistakes and editing your draft to sound more clear and convincing.
Full disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, we will earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you.
To answer whether Grammarly Premium is Worth It and can make your English documents error-free, we will cover the following topics. Feel free to jump to any section that interest you.
What Is Grammarly?
Grammarly is a software that analyzes English writings, checking for any errors. It is one of the most popular spellings and grammar checkers available online.
The software covers basic error checks, including grammar, punctuation and spelling. But it doesn’t stay there, as it shines at offering style and best practice suggestions.
Grammarly can even analyze sentences, phrases or paragraphs and rewrite them to make them sound more compelling and clear.
You may wonder how a computer can rewrite a whole sentence. Well, the answer is Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and, in particular, Natural Language Processing (NLP). With NLP, Grammarly can analyze and process language, including individual words, sentences, paragraphs and even whole documents. As a result, Grammarly gets an edge when compared with standard grammatical checkers.
Do I Even Need a Writing Checker?
You are probably saying to yourself: I’m a professional writer with thousands of words of experience; I’ve honed my style and can spot typos a mile away. Is Grammarly Premium worth it? Why do I need a writing checker?
Well, the short answer is time. Without an automated writing checker, you would have to read your piece several times. That doesn’t guarantee that you will come through without a single mistake. And as we can’t emphasize enough, a single slip can ruin your whole document.
Also, this manual checking and proofreading process takes time. Would it not be wonderful to be able to scan whole pages in seconds and single out most of the errors before editing?
Even if you are a seasoned writer, you can use a tool like this to do a lot of the heavy lifting and save you much time.
Furthermore, Grammarly can help you spot instances where your writing is convoluted and not fluent. It can even rewrite whole sentences for you, which is especially useful if you are not a native English speaker.
In a nutshell, a writing checker gives you that extra edge you need to make your work look polished and professional. That can be a massive difference whether you are composing an academic paper, business email or piece of web content. Furthermore, when you are drafting for the web, a polished, clean piece can be the difference between ranking on the first places of search engines, like Google and Bing, or not ranking at all.
Grammarly vs. Word. Is It Worth It?
One question that writers usually have is what extra mile a software like Grammarly gives you, compared with grammar checkers embedded with word processors.
Sure, Grammarly can spot the same Grammar errors that word processors detect. Still, it can also spot punctuation errors, like where to place commas properly and rewrite whole sentences to make them more straightforward.
Let’s show an example:
Imagine that we wrote the following paragraph. Note that we used a section from this same piece:
We recommend taking advantage of the yearly discount, since one year is not that much time if you are already committed to start a blog or if you write communications in English at work. Choosing yearly payments will get you a whopping 60% discount on your monthly price.
You can probably spot some errors, but can Grammarly improve the sentence?
Let’s run it through and see what recommendations we get:
As you can see, Grammarly spotted that unnecessary comma, which was an obvious one. But let’s take a look at the third suggestion:
See how Grammarly spotted the inconsistency between the verbs form taking, starting and writing, rephrasing the sentence to make it consistent and thus clearer.
Sentence restructuring is one of the features that make Grammarly stands out.
Grammarly Free
The Grammarly free version covers grammar, punctuation and spelling errors only. You can begin using the software without a credit card on Grammarly’s webpage.
An advantage of the free version is that you can use it indefinitely, which means it’s free forever. There’s no limit or trial period.
While not as robust as the Premium version, Grammarly Free can match, if not surpass, the average spell inspectors you get with most office software.
Besides, it also includes English convention checks between American, British, Canadian or Australian English.
Grammarly Free vs Grammarly Premium
In contrast with Grammarly Free, the Premium version comes with a far greater number of English writing checks, which includes sentence structure, context, and style. These include:
- Writing inconsistencies.
- Unclear structure.
- Overuse of words.
- Wordiness.
- Inappropriate tone.
- Insensitive language.
Are the Grammarly Premium Features Worth It?
To answer the question of whether Grammarly Premium is worth it, let’s delve into some of its features in detail. Here’s we share some examples in action: Here’s we share some examples in action:
Personalize Recommendations Based on the Type of Audience
One of the most extraordinary Grammarly Premium features is the ability to tailor writing suggestions according to your audience. You do this by setting the document goals, which include:
- Audience: Are your audience knowledgeable, expert or just general?
- Formality: You can choose between Informal, neutral or formal.
- Domain: Are you in an academic, business, casual, creative or general setting? Or are you writing an email?
- Tone: Do you want to sound neutral, confident, joyful, optimistic, analytical, urgent, respectful or urgent?
- Intent: whether you are telling a story, informing, describing or convincing.
Grammarly will apply a distinct set of rules, depending on which parameters you set.
Let’s provide an example; suppose you are composing an academic paper and come up with the following:
When you gather new software requirements, the first step you need to take is interviewing its key stakeholders, clients and future users. In the interview, you might identify additional individuals, departments and business functions you need to involve. Therefore, you will need to set additional interviews with them.
While this text should be adequate if you are writing a blog post, it is not proper for a more formal or academic setting. Let’s run it through Grammarly:
Grammarly accurately points out that in a formal setting, writing is almost always in the third person. Therefore, you need to remove the personal pronoun “You.”
Now, let’s change our goals a bit, setting them to Neutral formality and Business domain:
When you make the changes, the following appears:
Note how Grammarly no longer flags “you” pronouns as errors
In this way, Grammarly can help you write adequately for each context.
Advanced Sentence and Paragraph Structure
Let’s look at another example of how Grammarly can restructure a sentence or paragraph. Suppose that we wrote the following text:
Have you considered the challenges of implementing new technologies into a business? On the one hand, you have the pressing matter of the bottom line, that is, you need to keep your business profitable while you experiment with new technologies, which might prevent you from going too far. On the other hand, you could rethink your whole business model from the ground up, there are more gains to be had, but also there is more risk, as your attempt at disruption could put you out of business.
Now, let’s look at what Grammarly advises us to do:
On the first suggestion, Grammarly is telling us that the sentence is hard to read because it is too long (have three commas). It suggests that we break the sentence and even replace “while” with “At the same time.”
Let’s accept it and look at the second suggestion:
Grammarly recommends us a slight modification on the paragraph’s third sentence. Note how it shows us the proposed changes, in this case, breaking the sentence and eliminating a word.
The capability of rewriting a whole sentence is, in our opinion, one of the hallmarks of Grammarly. For this capability alone, Grammarly Premium is Worth It, as it has the potential of making your writing look less convoluted and more straightforward.
Overused Words
Another general pain when drafting long documents is that repetitive words can creep in easily in your writing. You may not even spot them if you are on your third read and are tired.
Repetitive words make your prose monotonous and boring. Therefore, it is crucial to use synonyms to improve reading flow.
Consider the exact text from the previous example:
When you gather new software requirements, the first step you need to take is interviewing its key stakeholders, clients and future users. In the interview, you might identify additional individuals, departments and business functions you need to involve. Therefore, you will need to set additional interviews with them.
Can you spot the duplicated word? Let’s run it through Grammarly:
See how the App spotted the use of “Additional” repeatedly and even suggest using “other” instead. You may go with it or choose another synonym by double-clicking on “other” after accepting the proposed modification:
Vocabulary Enhancement
In the last example, we gave a peek at another Grammarly feature, Vocabulary enhancement.
Again, the use of repetitive and monotonous terms can make your writing difficult and boring to read. Grammarly offers the possibility of clicking on any word to look at a synonyms list to cope with this problem. Consider the following example:
As you can see, we made sure that our writing was free of errors.
Now, let’s click on a word to look for some alternatives:
Note how Grammarly shows many possible synonyms in different contexts.
Choosing one modifies our text:
We could essentially rewrite our whole piece in this way.
Passive Voice
Passive voice, the sworn enemy of sounding confident and sure of yourself, or so you learned. Well, not necessarily. In some contexts, passive voice is just fine.
Grammarly can flag passive voice instances in your writing. Still, it all depends on your audience’s parameters and goals (see above). But let’s look at an example:
In most cases, the App will be downloaded without error to your phone. However, you could experience some trouble when your network connection fails. In most cases, the download will resume, but you will have to start all over again in some rare cases.
Can you recognize the passive voice in the text? Let’s run it through Grammarly:
Note that Grammarly flags the passive voice instance, and it tells us that it did so because we have set our goals to “Business writing.”
Let’s change our domain to “Casual” writing and see what happens:
And as a result:
Grammarly has tailored its recommendations according to our goals and no longer flags passive voice as an alert. Readers usually accept it in a casual setting.
Grammarly Plagiarism Checker
Seasoned writers know that when writing long pieces, you can incur unintentional plagiarism. The World Wide Web is colossal, and its users add millions of content pieces every day. As a result, you will end up writing something the same way someone else did sooner or later.
Grammarly Premium includes a plagiarism checker that can scan your entire document to prevent unintentional mistakes. Let’s demonstrate with a paragraph extracted from a blog post we wrote about Natural Language Processing Chatbots.
Companies that master NLP technology has the potential of gaining significant competitive advantage. Above all, with NLP you can service your customers 24/7 with human-like interaction, setting you apart from your competitors.
When we run it through Grammarly’s plagiarism checker, we get the following:
Note how Grammarly identifies the source of the offending paragraph or sentence.
Now you can single out any instance of plagiarism, eliminating the sentences or rewrite them as original work.
To learn more about the hallmarks of the Premium plan, visit Grammarly’s webpage.
Grammarly Premium Price
Grammarly offers three prices for their Premium version, depending on how many months in advance you pay. Therefore, when you pay more in advance, the discount is more significant.
Grammarly Premium current price is:
- Annually: One yearly payment of $139.95 ($11.96 a month), the lowest monthly price, but you have to pay the whole year in advance.
- Quarterly: Quarterly payments of $59.95, which result in a monthly price of $19.98.
- Monthly: $29.95 a month pay every month, the highest monthly price available.
We recommend taking advantage of the yearly discount. One year is not that much time if you are already committed to a project, and annual payments will get you a whopping 60% discount on your monthly price.
Grammarly Premium Is Worth It!
This post offered an overview of Grammarly’s Premium features, illustrating how it can spot grammar and style mistakes, making your writing sharp and perfected.
We showed you how writing without a single mistake is nearly impossible and how Grammarly can help you spot the obvious and not-so-obvious ones. A single stain can undermine your whole document, and as a result, it is imperative to prevent every slip.
Furthermore, examining and proofreading your writing can be time-consuming. Grammarly can be a game-changer.
Wrapping up, is Grammarly Premium worth it? You should check it out. Visit Grammarly’s homepage in the link to learn more.
Have you tried any online grammar checkers? Did it save you time and improve your writing? Leave a comment below.
