Grammarly is checking what I’m writing as I go, so there shouldn’t be any errors of substance by the time I push the post to the blog. All that moving of the text around and checking and rechecking what I’ve written is a lot of waste. While being nagged while I’m typing might slow me down a little bit, the finishing part of writing a blog post will be much faster. Remember how I said I start in Ulysses, then move to MarsEdit, and then to the web and only then I could use Grammarly? With the desktop app installed, now Grammarly checks my spelling, grammar, and punctuation in Ulysses and MarsEdit while I’m typing. When I downloaded the desktop app for Mac from, I discovered that it has changed a lot since I last used it, and it has way more capability than it did before.Īs before, you can use the Grammarly app as a web app and write directly into it, but the new Grammarly desktop app integrates with all text-entry capable apps on your Mac. I figured could copy the text from my blog post (yes, this will be the fourth copy of it) and paste it into the Grammarly app and then put it back on the blog. I desperately needed Grammarly to work on this particular blog post, and I wondered if maybe the standalone app could help me. I remembered that years ago, I downloaded and installed the standalone Grammarly app for the desktop. I needed Grammarly to work! Grammarly Desktop Normally I can tell what she means, but the other day this happened where the underlines were so far off from where the perceived error was that I couldn’t figure out what she was trying to correct. I’ll hover, and it will be referring to a word on the line above or below where the underline occurred. Occasionally, and I can’t find the root cause, the red underlines aren’t under the correct word or words. There’s one problem with Grammarly that happens from time to time when I’m using it within the WordPress interface in my web browser. Grammarly and I don’t always agree, but she’s also quite good at telling me when I should have hyphenated a word or when I hyphenated unnecessarily. Heck, she found an extra comma in this very paragraph! You’d think I’d start learning to put them in correctly after a while, but you’d be wrong. I suspect at the end of every post it’s a zero-sum game on the comma issue, and every time she makes a comma-related suggestion I realize she’s right. It puts in commas I’ve forgotten and removes the ones I mistakenly add. Punctuation is another important feature of Grammarly. Grammar and punctuation are key features for me. More importantly, I get so much more help from Grammarly than simply spell check. Seriously, spell check? macOS is often wrong… I wish I knew why macOS’s spell check is getting worse. I was using the contraction for “you are” but it wanted me to use “your”. For example, as I was writing this up, the built-in tool told me that I had used the incorrect version of “you’re” vs. I’m not sure what’s causing this, but lately, the built-in tool is wrong more and more often on really easy rules. You might be asking yourself why I don’t just depend on the built-in spell-check in macOS. I’ve never figured out why she’s moody that way. ![]() If Grammarly is in a good mood, I can sometimes add an unfamiliar word to her dictionary for my account, but sometimes she doesn’t offer me that option even when I’m logged into the service. When I disagree with her, which is usually because it’s a term she doesn’t quite understand, I can click the Dismiss option so the red line goes away. If I agree (and she’s usually right), I only have to click the correction to accept it. I like using Grammarly because a simple hover over a red line reveals the correction Grammarly is suggesting. Once the post is in WordPress on my site, I wait for Grammarly to go through the text and put thick, red underlines on all of my errors. I add in my images with captions and do my final-ish edits. When I’ve got a first draft complete, I copy the Markdown text over to the awesome MarsEdit. ![]() ![]() I write my blog posts by starting in Ulysses where I can write on iPad or Mac and still use TextExpander. Grammarly is a freemium service and while I could probably benefit from the premium service, the free tier has a lot of benefits. Its job in life is to watch what you’re typing and look for typos, punctuation mistakes, grammar errors, and even to let you know what tone you’re setting in your writing. I’ve been using the Grammarly plugin for browsers for ages. ![]() Grammarly Suggestions Come Up On Hover Over Red Line
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |