It’s been a while… Work got busy, life got busy, and I lost my enthusiasm for posting to this blog, all that’s about to change! I’m restarting the blog and making it less SQL Server focussed and more general to Software Development/Anything I find interesting at the time. I’ve also got a new theme, can’t restart this thing without procrastinating for weeks about the look right? Let me know what you think.
Anyway, as an incentive to start writing on here again, I thought I’d give Grammarly a try, for anyone that’s been here before you’ll know my grammar is terrible my writing is awful and my poorly strung together sentences are shocking (But hey at least I try to get the technical posts accurate :) ). Previously I’ve used the built-in spellchecker tools in Microsoft Word, Those days are gone, time to up my game and give Grammarly a go. I’m writing and editing this post in Grammarly Premium, because, well, why not? It can’t make my writing any worse right? Impressions so far…
Free Version
Having run this post through the free version of Grammarly my initial findings are it picked up all typos Microsoft Word and found along with a couple more, it also suggested a lot of commas, Grammarly really likes commas! Once it was done with commas it moves on to noise words that it deemed “Unnecessary” a few of these made sense, but others read better with them left in.
Premium Version
Remember I mentioned the free version really liked commas? Well, premium takes that to a whole new level!
Surprisingly the premium version also picked out a couple of typos that the free version missed, I’m not sure what’s going on there as I thought both versions used the same spell checker.
Both the free and premium tier give your writing a score and add comments on the clarity, engagement and delivery, I found the free version marked these down with things that really made little difference to the style/readability of the content. When using the premium version, the scores massively improved after I took a couple of its suggestions that made very little difference to the feel of the post, possibly a way to steer people towards the premium version.
With premium, I managed to get the “score” out of 100 of this post from 80 to 97, did that improve the post? Maybe a little, it certainly removed a couple of mistakes, but for the most part, I’m not convinced by the scoring of it all.
Final Thoughts
I’m not sure premium is for me, the price is quite high for the amount of use I’d get out of it (£23 for the monthly plan or around £9 a month if you take the yearly plan). I just don’t write enough for the marginal gain of Free vs Premium to be a seller for me. The free version however, it outperformed Microsoft Word, is free and runs in most places browser (mobile keyboards, desktop app, browser etc.) I’m sold on this! How can you not be sold on free, right? I’ll most likely move back to the free tier next month unless I find some significant amount of value-added over my future few posts.