Tag: writing technology

Grammarly review

Recently, the good folks at Grammarly were kind enough to invite me to review their their product. In case you haven’t heard of it, Grammarly is an online “writing-enhancement platform” that offers proofreading and plagiarism-checking capabilities.

Grammarly is simple to use. You just paste or upload your text and click the review button (though you also have the option of choosing from several different standards of review, including business, technical, and casual). When it has finished its review, your writing is given a numerical score (100 is the best) and then it takes you through the piece line by line to show you where it thinks you goofed.

I spent a great deal of time playing around with Grammarly, and I used samples from many different sources. Unfortunately, I came to the conclusion that I can’t recommend Grammarly since it’s bedeviled by false positives and bizarre suggestions.

Grammarly’s commonly confused words checker is particularly inept. It wanted me to change ‘seat’ to ‘set’ in the following sentence: “The Green Party has given a seat to London Assembly member Jenny Jones….” It also thought that ‘culled’ should be ‘called,’ and ‘polity’ should be ‘policy.’

The spellchecker is similarly dodgy. It flagged ‘unbeliever’ and ‘China’ as misspelled words! I suspect punctuation might have had something to do with it: ‘unbeliever’ was originally in quotes, while ‘China’ originally had an apostrophe and an ‘s’ at the end. But a program that gets confused by basic punctuation doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Grammarly’s grammar checker also got tripped up on a number of occasions. It flagged the word ‘have’ in the following sentence: “A total of 30 new peers have been appointed…” Grammarly argued that the subject of the sentence was a singular or uncountable noun and therefore it did not agree with the present tense verb ‘have.’ The original sentence was correct, however. ‘Total’ can take either a plural or a singular verb depending on context: if it’s preceded by ‘the,’ it’s singular; if it’s preceded by ‘a,’ it’s plural. Here endeth the lesson.

Grammarly is not without its benefits, though. Having multiple standards of review is helpful, although I wish that I had more control over what it was looking for. The ‘creative’ standard seemed to work best for fiction, but it’s a barebones evaluation. It doesn’t flag passive voice or sentences that begin with conjunctions, and while those things are arguably less of an issue in creative writing, it would be nice if you could choose to include them in a creative-level review.

Grammarly’s plagiarism checker also seems to work reasonably well. When I used articles that I’ve published online,  each one was flagged because of its similarities with the published version. One cool thing is that Grammarly will compose a citation in each of the standard styles (e.g. MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) that you can use to cite the work. It’s a rather handy feature if, like me, you hate formatting bibliographies.

Alas, these pluses don’t outweigh the minuses. Wading through a slew of false positives and erroneous suggestions gets old fast. Even when Grammarly got things right, I didn’t find it all that helpful (I don’t need to spend $29.95 a month to find conjunctions at the beginnings of sentences!). Until they fine-tune things, you’re probably better off sticking with MS Word’s spelling and grammar checkers followed by old-fashioned human proofreading.

Microsoft OneNote

I fired up my new copy of Office Enterprise the other day and, even though I’ll never use most of the programs, there is one program (besides Word) that I really like: OneNote.

OneNote is a digital note-taking program.  You can use it for just about anything, from taking notes in class or a meeting to researching travel destinations.  I’m using it to organize my writing research.

I’ve created a notebook for my Egyptian novel.  Within that notebook, I have tabs, such as ‘background info’ and ‘main characters.’  Under each tab, I have a variety of notes.  For example, each character has their own note with their vital statistics.  It’s wonderfully easy to flip between notes and all notes are searchable, so it doesn’t take long to find what you’re looking for.  You can even import handwritten notes from a Tablet PC and it will allegedly translate your chicken scratch into text.  I don’t have a Tablet PC, so I don’t know how well that works.  Seems like it could be a cool feature though.

But that’s not the best part.  OneNote allows you to clip webpages and PDF documents and incorporate them into your notes.  That makes research a lot less time consuming.

With Word and OneNote, I think I have the perfect replacement for Scrivener.

A replacement for Scrivener?

In an earlier post, I mentioned that one of the best things about having a Mac was that it allowed me to use Scrivener, a great word processing tool designed for creative writers.  Since it’s a Mac-only program, I thought I’d have to make do with Word from now on.  Now, I’m happy to report that I may have found a replacement for Scrivener that will run on Windows.  It’s called PageFour and I discovered it through a link on the Scrivener website.  Scrivener’s creator had all sorts of good things to say about it, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

My initial impression was that PageFour is basically Scrivener for Windows.  It has the same binder format that I loved in Scrivener, though here it’s called a ‘Notebook’.  It also has the snapshot functionality that proved to be so useful when I was working on the first draft of my WIP (basically, it allows you to take a ‘picture’ of the page you’re working on that you can easily revert to if you don’t like the subsequent changes you’ve made).  In fact, the snapshot tool was originally a part of PageFour and the creator of Scrivener liked it so much that he borrowed it for his program.  PageFour also has a ‘Smart Edit’ feature that allows you to scan your text for repeated words or phrases, making it easier to identify and murder your darlings.   I also think it’s easier to format text in PageFour since you have a toolbar that allows you to position text and change its attributes.  With Scrivener, you had to do all that through a pull-down menu.

PageFour isn’t a carbon copy of Scrivener and it’s missing some of the bells and whistles of its Mac cousin.  For example, it doesn’t have anything like the corkboard or the notecards.  It also doesn’t look as polished (like almost all Mac programs, Scrivener was pretty).  These issues aside, I really like Scrivener and I think I’ll end up purchasing the full version.