I’m one of the , probably many millions of, people offered a free month of Grammarly Premium, the online proofreader, in return for blogging about it.
My only previous experience of Grammarly was to read the self published novel of a friend who claimed that Grammarly was all she needed to turn out a professional quality product and she didn’t know why people bothered with that whole tedious submission, content edit, copy edit, proof reading business. After reading the novel, I very gently tried to correct this assumption and she no longer speaks to me.
As you can imagine, my impression of Grammarly is somewhat sceptical. However I’m going to give it a really fair whack and will report back on it. This maybe unfair of me since everything I’m currently writing has really hard words in it that confuse the hell out of Word’s built in spell/grammar checker but any dictionary that doesn’t have ‘reins’ in it, instead insisting that I substitute ‘reigns’, isn’t worth the paper or pixels it’s printed on.
I’d love to compare notes with anyone else who is giving it a trial.
Elin Gregory 
Good luck 🙂 I’m not sure I’m brave enough to try offering my services for Grammarly, but I’m def. up for helping you fight against Word in your WIP when/if you want a reader 🙂 🙂 🙂 Hmmm, I’ve never had a reighs/reins trouble, though!! We must be using a dif. version.
Oh it’s Grammarly that is trying to correct reins [in a horse-riding context] to reigns. So far, so uninspired.
Thanks, sweetie. I’m making progress with that story you had a look at. Olivier is much more overtly concerned about everything now 🙂
Ah, that makes sense 😉 And I can’t wait to read more of overtly concerned Olivier. Those boys were much fun to spend time with 🙂 🙂 🙂
Lol. She no longer speaks to you. Sorry but it IS brill. xx
Sad but true 🙂
No algorithm will ever take the place of humans when it comes to preparing a manuscript for publication.
I’m very curious to hear what you find out.
No arguments from me, Theo. So far it doesn’t seem even as useful as Word’s built in system and it’s not nearly as much fun to use as Dr Wicked’s http://www.editminion.com. But maybe I haven’t discovered how to use the goodies yet?
Re: Grammarly. I like it for my Facebook and emails. As a writer and an English teacher with mild dyslexia I find it useful to keep from looking like a complete fool to my family and friends. Needless to say, they still catch me with an error or two and revel in their success (especially past students). However, I would never depend on Grammarly for editing a novel. Too many self-published writers have blemished self-publishing because they will not risk having an editor comment on their work. My advice to all self-published writers would be to ignore the ego and spend the money necessary to get your work professionally edited. No work of mine will ever be printed until it has gone through at least three or four rounds of professional editing. As costly as this is it is worth every penny spent.
This should be engraved on every self pubber’s heart. I’ve been playing with Grammarly and it’s okay just to make one re-read the text and really THNK about the prose. But If I followed the recommendations quite a lot of them would give me sentences that make no sense. Also the dctionary is VERY basic. I wouldn’t expect it to handle foreign words, especially Welsh, or technical terms, like parts of armour, but some of the corrections are bizarre – for instance reigns suggested as a correction for reins in an equestrian context.
Self publishing is far too scary for me. You need such a well developed business sense, a terrific support network, and a really good and potentially popular product to offer. Without any of those it’s much easier to go to epublishers and accept the rejections. If one is lucky enough to be picked up one has to accept that there will still be errors in the finished text. I don’t think I’ve read a book in the past five years, trad paper pub, trad epub or self pub, that hasn’t had a small scatter of errors.
I am afraid you are right about errors ending up in most work today regardless of whether the book is self pub or trad pub. It is disconcerting, and I wish we had more Lynne Trusses out there to help us hammer out the grammar! She should create the next grammar program!