Grammarly will highlight complex, long, and overused words that may make your writing hard to understand. It also flags overly familiar contractions and personal language, such as ‘you’re’ and ‘I’.
You can choose a domain from the self-explanatory options of general, business, email, casual, or creative to tailor Grammarly’s suggestions accordingly. Simplify your vocabulary to improve your readability.
Grammar
Grammarly checks for spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, and misused words. It also highlights sentence length issues. It recommends that you shorten lengthy sentences and use a mix of sentence types to keep your readers engaged.
Grammarly also suggests alternatives to complex or overused words. For example, it may suggest ‘preposterous’ instead of ‘ridiculous’. It also looks for repeated word usage, emotional tells, and passive voice.
Grammarly and Hemingway both use Flesch-Kincaid readability scores to determine how easy your writing is to understand. However, Grammarly goes further and analyzes a wider range of factors that affect readability, such as wordiness, sentence structure, and vocabulary. It also provides detailed reports that focus on specific areas of your writing. It works in almost all text areas, including email and apps like Google Docs.
Spelling
Grammarly’s spelling check is an important tool, especially for those who are prone to embarrassing typos and grammatical errors. It also flags inconsistencies and suggests synonyms. It can even rewrite sentences to make them sound more natural. The Premium version offers a more extensive spellcheck and a plagiarism detector, along with more style suggestions.
Both Hemingway and Grammarly have a readability analysis, but Grammarly’s is more comprehensive. It highlights complex words, long sentences, and overused phrases. It will also suggest replacing them with simpler alternatives. For instance, instead of writing “preposterous” or “ridiculous”, you can replace them with “unbelievable” or “absurd”.
However, it’s important to note that Grammarly isn’t perfect. Blanketly accepting its recommendations can backfire and strip your writing of its voice. It is best to review each suggestion carefully and consider its impact on your audience before accepting it.
Punctuation
Grammarly offers suggestions for punctuation, and it also highlights recurring misspellings. Its premium version goes a step further and recommends corrections for inconsistent or repetitive use of words.
The tool also assesses readability by using the Flesch reading-ease score. This score takes into account word length and sentence length, as well as the number of unique and rare words. However, you should be cautious about accepting all of the tool’s suggestions. For example, too many repetitive words may bore your audience while a large percentage of uncommon words may confuse them.
If you’re looking for a comprehensive grammar-checking tool, Grammarly is the way to go. However, you can also try a free alternative like Hemingway to check spelling and readability. It’s important to find a writing assistant that meets your needs and budget.
Style
Grammarly provides a readability score that is determined by measuring the amount of effort a reader has to expend in order to understand your writing. It takes into account sentence length, vocabulary, and the use of squinting modifiers. It also highlights words that are repeated within the same paragraph or within the same sentence, recommending that they be changed to increase your readability score.
Ginger offers some similar functions, but they are limited and not as advanced as Grammarly’s. For example, it misses a lot of grammatical errors and doesn’t explain them as thoroughly.
Both Grammarly and Hemingway Editor highlight grammatical mistakes and offer editing suggestions that you can apply with a single click. They also check your tone and style, adjusting your writing to the audience you’re targeting.
Readability
Grammarly is a premium writing tool that can do much more than just correct spelling mistakes. It also helps writers improve the readability and style of their content.
The program uses an algorithm to determine how easy it will be for readers to understand your content. It takes into account the average word length and the number of syllables in each word. It can help you avoid overusing complex words, which may make your writing hard to read.
It also looks for personal language such as pronouns, idioms and slang. It can also flag unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. It can even suggest synonyms, antonyms and phrasing alternatives. The program can even rewrite sentences and paragraphs to make them more readable. It can even rephrase sentences that start with “to be” or phrases that use passive voice.