Grammarly.com, a review

A while ago I was approached to do a review for Grammarly.com, which is a resource that checks your grammar, and is supposed to be way better at it than Microsoft Word. Cambodia is full of the worst grammar, basically some of the worst as I like to call it "khmerlish" ever. All of the clothing they wear, the signs they post, even products that are being marketed are full of ridiculously incorrect grammar. So the hunt was on for some product with horrifically incorrect grammar to test.

At hotels here they often given you packets of shampoo to use. A while ago I received one that made me literally laugh out loud as I was reading it. I know they have this product written in khmer and they sell it all over my town, but this is the final English product that they're marketing to foreigners? It really could use some help. So I typed up what was written on the back into Grammarly's website to see what it would suggest.

This is exactly what the package of shampoo says. Amazing khmerlish, right? So after I plugged it into grammarly.com's Grammar Checker, this is what it showed me.

So I started working through all of the tools to fix it. The spelling, punctuation, and capitalization tools are awesome, as well as the synonyms tool. They offer you fixes right there and will replace it for you, which I really like. Then I can see what has been fixed. As I worked through the more hefty grammar problems it got a bit harder. I wish that they would give you suggestions to fix what is wrong with your actual sentence in addition to telling you what's wrong; mostly because I'm grammar lazy and don't want to figure out how to fix the sentence myself by reading about the problem and the examples of correct and incorrect sentences. Really though, it's great that it even recognizes such complex grammar points as a squinting modifier, which apparently existed in the first sentence.

After a couple of times fixing problems and then re-checking them in through their grammar review, only changing what the program suggested I change, I ended up with this.

As as you can see it's not 100% perfect, but I'd say the grammar is immensely better. There are still problems, but I think it makes a lot more sense than it did before. A native English speaker, or someone who has been speaking English for a long time probably wouldn't make most of the mistakes left in this document anyway.

Oh, and something else I found really cool about Grammarly is that it offers a plagiarism detector, and it will check your grammar according to the type of paper you're writing.

Overall, I think Grammarly.com offers a really great service. It would be great for possibly a business or foreign NGO, to offer their workers who are not particularly confident in their English writing skills, but have to write reports, or important e-mails. It would also be great for college students to use when writing essays for classes.

If you're interested, Grammarly offers a free 7-day trial, so you should try it out on an upcoming essay or important report and see how much it helps you.