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Whether you’re a writer, editor, or content marketer, you deal with content every day. And with that comes the routine grammar mistakes, punctuation errors, and spellchecks.
No matter how many years of experience you have, a grammar checker can make your life easier. But with so many tools available, you’ll need to carefully weigh your options before choosing the right one for you.
One option is Grammarly. Boasting 30 million active users, this grammar-checking tool can help refine your content by spotting spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors and suggesting changes in tone and delivery.
The tool is great for anyone who works with content. But take its suggestions with a grain of salt — it has some limitations and can be faulty at times.
As a content marketing agency, we’ve been using Grammarly for quite some time, enabling us to create this extensive Grammarly review. Here’s everything you need to know about the tool, including the thoughts of The Blogsmith staff and content marketers and freelancers from around the Web.
What is Grammarly?
Grammarly is a freemium tool for identifying minor to major issues in your writing. The free version of the tool is available as a Chrome browser extension.
Besides the spelling and punctuation checks, Grammarly can detect dialect variations, improper tone, wordiness, and readability and suggest changes to improve your work.
For example, if you commonly misspell the same word (typing “sing” instead of “sign” or “angel” instead of “angle”), Grammarly helps you correct it.
It helps you identify the right option among words that can be confusing, such as “during” and “while” or “from” and “since.”
You can also use it to avoid classic mistakes like “your” instead of “you’re” and “there” instead of “their.”
Paired with a logged-in Grammarly account, it’s possible for Grammarly to learn from your writing style — not automatically red-flagging items that actually make sense in the context you’re using them.
Using Grammarly’s free Chrome browser extension, it’s possible to spellcheck writing across many different mediums, including email, social media, WordPress, and Microsoft Word (via the Grammarly add-in, available for Windows and Mac).
Another option is to directly copy and paste the text into the in-browser or desktop editor for grammar and writing suggestions.
However, there’s a caveat:
The editor usually supports multiple text formats, such as bold, italics, underlines, and bulleted and numbered lists. But, in some cases, the editor might change the formatting of the original text.
For example, it might make all the text in a bulleted list bold even if only a few words were bold in the original document:
The editor doesn’t support image and table formatting, so you’ll need to fix the formatting manually if you paste the edited content back into your document.
Grammarly also ignores various headline formats and replaces them with bold text, prompting the tool to treat headings like any other sentence.
But formatting errors are such minor inconveniences compared to what Grammarly actually offers — highly tailored grammar and writing suggestions.
Through Grammarly’s paid Premium product, you can get document-specific recommendations for categories that include:
- Academic writing
- Business writing
- General writing
- Email writing
- Creative writing
- Casual writing
You can also fine-tune the suggestions according to the intent, formality, and the audience’s knowledge levels.
For example, if you’re writing a product release article aimed at C-suite readers, you can choose:
- Domain: Business
- Intent: Inform
- Audience: Expert
- Formality: Formal
But if you’re putting together a how-to blog post for B2B marketers on a website that uses casual, conversational language, you can go with:
- Domain: General
- Intent: Describe
- Audience: General
- Formality: Informal
How Do Content Marketers and Freelance Writers Use Grammarly?
The staff members at The Blogsmith are among the millions of people who use Grammarly every day. As a content marketing agency, we encourage the use of Grammarly and provide access to its premium Business account for every writer and editor on our team.
And they have, in fact, made it an integral part of their working process.
Amber Bennett, an editor at The Blogsmith, says, “I like to run a Grammarly scan before and after I edit a document. The former helps me quickly clean up common grammar and spelling errors so I can focus on deeper issues while I edit; the latter helps me double-check my work.”
The Blogsmith writer Usman Ghani also thinks Grammarly is worth it, saying the browser extension helps him conveniently correct errors in different websites and content formats, including emails, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, and Google Docs.
Grammarly is a handy tool that helps our writers and editors produce quality content. And since we’ve had such great results with Grammarly at The Blogsmith, I’ve joined the Grammarly Collective as an Ambassador.
As part of the Grammarly Collective, I help people understand how Grammarly works and how the tool can simplify their writing or editing tasks. I also connect with other Grammarly users and share unique knowledge on the tool’s helpfulness in our academic or work lives.
Being an Ambassador also gives me the opportunity to attend Grammarly’s keynotes. And the program has helped me better incorporate Grammarly’s capabilities into my workflow.
While the Ambassador program has helped many, people outside the Grammarly Collective also love using the tool.
Here’s how freelance writers and content marketers from around the world use Grammarly to make their writing better:
Kelsey Jones, the former editor of Search Engine Journal, says that the tool has really opened her mind. She adds this to her Grammarly review, “I thought I was good at grammar until I started using this tool. Now, I am constantly not only fixing some of my mistakes (and the work that I edit), but I’m also becoming a better writer because I’m learning the nuances of grammar that it points out to me.”
Here’s an interesting use case of Grammarly by a non-U.S. writer writing for a U.S. brand or audience:
Kitiara Pascoe says, “I use the free version for Americanisms. I’m a British writer but have a lot of American clients, so after I finish the piece I’m working on, I paste it into Grammarly, and it shows me where I’ve used British English and what it should be changed to.”
Heinrich C. A. Rich is another content marketer who uses Grammarly to bridge the gap between his German language and English content creation. He says, “In our team, we have a mini competition about word count and diversity of vocabulary.”
Of course, it’s important to remember that Grammarly is a computer program. Just as Google is constantly tweaking its search algorithm to better represent the needs of the humans that use it, so too is Grammarly constantly tweaking its ability to edit for human grammar rules.
When it comes to industry-specific writing, Mike Straus has a bit of a bone to pick in his own Grammarly review:
“The Good: It’s wonderful for really mentally-intensive work like medical trade magazine assignments where your brain is focused entirely on the content, and 1 or 2 grammatical errors might slip past you.
“The Bad: With trade mag stuff, you have to teach it a lot of industry-specific terms otherwise, it’ll label them as errors.
“The Ugly: It’s a real pain to use it with more creative, personality-driven stuff where you’ve got some creative license.”
Elizabeth McIntyre says, “I love Grammarly, and I use it regularly. But you have to use common sense with it too. It will sometimes make changes that aren’t totally necessary.”
Kathy Krueger adds to this Grammarly review, “I’ve used the full paid version in the past, but found it cumbersome to sort through which of their recommendations were correct and which weren’t. I think you need to know your grammar rules pretty well yourself to know when to override it.”
Diego Trejo, an editor at The Blogsmith, thinks twice about Grammarly’s suggestions before making changes.
He says, “Whenever I’m rewriting segments and such, I do it on the Grammarly app before I move it to the document to check for these things (as an extra layer of security). But I take rephrasing suggestions and sentence rearrangements with a grain of salt,” noting they frequently conflict with our client’s goals.
On a final note, specifically with regard to Grammarly’s free version, Alison Rakotonirina says, ”I am a sucker for the weekly reports. I try to make fewer mistakes each week (type more accurately, quickly!), and I love the ‘pat on the back’ as it always tells me my vocabulary is bigger than 99% of users.”
Using Grammarly With Google Docs
The aforementioned content marketers and freelancers shared their own Grammarly reviews and a number of situations where Grammarly helped improve their writing.
But in addition to the grammar recommendations, many people feel Grammarly is worth it due to how easily they can use it with Google Docs.
While the tool doesn’t have a dedicated Google Docs add-on, Grammarly’s browser extension seamlessly lays over the document to offer real-time grammar and spelling checks.
You don’t need to copy-paste text into Grammarly’s Editor. Instead, you can directly access its suggestions through Google Docs and edit without any hassle.
Why Should Content Marketers and Writers Use Grammarly?
Having an efficient editing process means sharing the cleanest possible document with an editor, reducing the amount of time they might have to spend making your content publishable.
In general, improving your writing can have a measured effect on your company’s bottom line. So, if there’s an easy way to do that, why not give it a try?
An internal survey of Grammarly users found that:
- 76% of users find it makes writing more enjoyable.
- 99% of student users see improved writing grades.
- 85% of users say using it made them stronger writers.
That’s because Grammarly isn’t just an editing tool. It’s also a personalized writing assistant for an individual, a team, or even an entire content agency like The Blogsmith.
In addition to Grammarly’s suggestions, it allows you to add your business style guide to the tool’s knowledge base.
If you’re using Grammarly Business, the style guide is updated for the entire team. There’s no need to repeatedly correct the same errors or convey the rules to each team member.
This is a feature we regularly use at The Blogsmith. As a content marketing agency, we rely on a detailed style guide to maintain a consistent style in all our pieces — no matter which team member is at the keyboard.
By incorporating The Blogsmith’s style guide into our Grammarly Business account, our writers and editors can seamlessly follow our style requirements without having to refer to an additional document.
Another great feature is Grammarly’s Plagiarism Checker, which compares the text with billions of websites to highlight similar sentences. You can see how much the highlighted text matches each flagged webpage, which helps you avoid plagiarism.
For example, this tool can help content marketers ensure no part of their content is published elsewhere to avoid any search algorithm dings. Similarly, a freelance writer might want to double-check that their wording is unique to avoid accidental plagiarism.
For each content piece, Grammarly reports on the text’s quality based on its clarity, delivery, engagement, and correctness. As you address each suggestion, the performance score improves.
The report also shows the average word and sentence length, reading and speaking time, and readability.
Grammarly has also entered the artificial intelligence (AI) race with GrammarlyGO, which is immensely useful for content marketers. The feature lets you polish existing text or create full drafts with a few instructions using the power of AI.
The free version offers 100 prompts/month to ideate, compose, or improve content with GrammarlyGO, and you get additional prompts with a paid plan.
Disclaimer: You’ll still need to edit or reframe the text, as using AI-generated content as-is might adversely affect SEO. It may also not be original or creative and could decrease your website’s content quality.
How Much Does Grammarly Cost?
In this Grammarly review, it’s important to call out the fact that the free version of Grammarly covers the most critical grammar and spelling checks and is very functional on its own.
However, Grammarly Premium is supercharged for taking a content draft from “meh” to impactful, thanks to 400+ complex writing checks. Grammarly’s Premium version includes elements such as:
- Advanced checks for punctuation, grammar, context, and sentence structure
- Suggestions to improve vocabulary
- Genre- (and format-) specific writing checks
- A built-in plagiarism detector
- Generative AI technology
Like many other software tools on the market, Grammarly’s pricing for Premium, in many ways, reflects how much you trust in the tool and how risk-averse you are. There’s a huge gap between the month-to-month subscription price of $30 and the annual price, billed as one payment of $144 ($12/month).
There’s also a Business version, which is the better choice if you have a team of more than three members. The Grammarly Business plan costs $15 a month for each member and comes with features like brand tones and admin control for better team management.
My suggestion?
Try Grammarly’s free browser extension and note the frequency with which it recommends changes that make your writing stronger. If it ends up being a better editor than you can be on your own, opt-in for the annual plan, which is almost $20 cheaper per month than the monthly subscription plan.
Grammarly Review: Should Writers & Marketers Use Grammarly?
For our team, the answer is “yes.”
Grammarly’s error detections and helpful suggestions make writing so much easier. Not to mention its plagiarism detector, custom style guide, and expansion into AI with GrammarlyGO.
When you add it all up, we recommend that every freelancer and content marketer try out this tool.
Ready to take the plunge? Purchase access to Grammarly Premium or get a Business plan for your agency.
Still deciding? Take the free version for a spin to see if Grammarly is worth it to you to have access to the paid features. And don’t forget to test the browser extension with your favorite writing platforms.
