Is the due date coming soon? No confidence with your assignment? Many students will face this problem during their study at university. Fortunately, technology makes our life much easier, even in writing. There are many grammar check websites that are available online, which assist you to check your work and give you some suggestions. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Let’s briefly understand how it works behind your computer, instead of directly going through websites. In fact, a grammar checker is usually complex software, which collects massive patterns and rules of a language. Thus, it has an ability to point out mistakes or misuses on a human’s work. For example, an article, a preposition, a misspelling or a vocabulary. Those can be pointed out by a checker once you make a mistake. After checking a human’s work, the software will give a better solution, tell you what’s wrong with it and give the author a hint to solve the grammar issue. It’s amazing, isn’t it? There are two examples below, which is just for a demo. You can find more than that and select whatever you like.
Grammarly is one grammar checker, which can check your whole essay at the same time. And the most important thing is that it’s free for the basic version. Users still receive explanations, suggestions and corrections after checking their work, even when just using the free version. Additionally, it can be installed within a browser such as Chrome, which makes it much more convenient. The only drawback is that users must register as a member, otherwise they cannot use it.
Ginger is another checker, which is a similar product to Grammarly. The advantage is that users can check their work without registering as a member if the length of the paragraph is less than a hundred words. In addition, Ginger provides extra functionalities such as rephrasing. Other grammar checkers are available online as well, but I won’t introduce all of them. Give them a try and see which one is the best match for you.
Now let’s talk about some tips about using these grammar checkers. First, you can try to check your essay on two checkers and select the best option or combination. Second, these checkers are usually based on American English, so we should avoid spelling corrections sometimes. Third, some vocabularies confuse checkers, especially professional terminologies. In this situation, you should correct the essay carefully. Lastly, we can use it as a reference, but we should not rely on it too much. Because it’s just software, it can make a mistake as well. Therefore, we take corrections from a checker as a reference to enhance our work. That’s our main reason to use them.
I hope this post helps anyone interested in this kind of tool to assist them to overcome writing difficulties. If you have got any further question, let me know in the comments below, or email us at ask.sal@federation.edu.au.
-Vince