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 generic 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 :) ). I've always previously just used the built-in spellchecker tools in Microsoft Word and thought I'd step up and give Grammarly a go. I'm writing and editing this blog post in the free version of Grammarly, and once it's done, I'll run it through the premium version and post that version below so you can all see the difference. I'm pretty sceptical that this can improve my writing but hey any help is help right? ## Free Version Having run this post through the free version of Grammarly my initial findings are it picked up all the same typos as Microsoft Word and suggested a lot of commas, Grammarly really likes commas! It also suggested removing some noise words that it deemed "Unnecessary" a few of these made sense but a couple more I prefered with the word left in. ## Premium Version Remember I mentioned the free version really liked commas? Well, premium takes that to a whole new level! Commas, as far as the eye can see! Surprisingly the premium version also picked out a couple of spelling mistakes that the free version didn't find, 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, and I found that the free version marked these down. When using the premium version, they all 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 low value-add. With the premium version, I managed to get the "score" out of 100 of this post from 79 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 unsure that premium for me at least justifies the hefty price tag: £23 per month if you pay monthly or £9 a month if you take the yearly plan. I'm sure there is more value here for someone who writes a lot more than I will be, but it still seems quite steep. The free version outperformed Microsoft Word in my tests, is free and runs in most places browser, mobile keyboards, desktop app. 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.