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By Falcon Storm/ One thing I constantly tell people is that what you post online is a reflection of who you are as a brand. As an author, it’s extremely important to come across as literate, so naturally, I’m always on the lookout for tools to help me do just that.

Recently I was offered the opportunity to try out Grammarly Premium for a short time. I was very impressed with it and used it on everything I wrote for a time to get a good handle on what Grammarly has to offer.

So, here are the Pros and Cons as I see them.

Pros

Grammarly works in EVERY text entry field. I used it for my work in Canva, Facebook, WordPress, Tumblr and many, many more. The fact that Grammarly worked in all of them is great, it prevents a lot of copy and pasting between documents in order to double check things.

Grammarly checks for EVERYTHING. Wow, I know I’m good at some things and bad at others, but Grammarly was letting me know about weak word choices, passive voice, vague words, prepositional phrases, dangling participles, and more than I care to admit.

Grammarly also allows you to upload documents to have them checked. So you’re able to check previous documents by uploading them and checking them through the site.

You can tailor Grammarly to the type of writing you’re doing. Yes, finally something that distinguished between blog posts and novel writing. And it actually looks for different things based on what you’re writing. When I switched from blog post to novel, BOOM!, there were all my passive voice mistakes that I have in blog posts, but don’t want in my novel. There are other settings as well, so you can check for specific issues instead of everything all the time.

The Premium Grammarly (which is what I was testing) has a good price point. If you go yearly, it costs a little bit more than a Netflix subscription per month. ($11.66/month if you buy yearly.)

Cons

It does cost money for the Premium. Sure, buying yearly gets you a good price point, but the other options aren’t as much bang for the buck. Quarterly costs $19.88/month and month by month is $29.95. But really, you’d want this product year round anyway, so this isn’t a big con in my mind.

The document upload is very limited. For an author, such as myself, it’d be nice to be able to upload a full WIP and have the whole thing checked. When I attempted to upload more than the allowable file size, it would tell me that they were working on expanding the capabilities for longer documents. So hopefully that will be a fix later on.

Speaking of the document upload, bad news Mac users. In order to get your documents uploaded, you’ll need to export your Pages document over to Word. (Thankfully, Pages has that functionality built in.) So also, not a big deal.

Overall

During my trial, Grammarly became a MAJOR part of my writing. I admit, I found the little green circle comforting to have on all my text boxes. It helped me with all my little comma issues and little grammar mistakes (I’m not admitting to huge mistakes). Sure, I had a couple missteps when I started. Obviously, I wasn’t able to upload my entire WIP, but I separated it into chapter sized bits and then I was good to go. I liked being able to switch it back and forth from the document types I was writing (although this is a Premium feature only). My overall feeling about Grammarly? I’m going to try to get my wife to add this into our budget, so I can keep using it.

Try it for yourself! Win a free 6-month subscription to Grammarly Premium.

Falcon Storm was born in the frozen wastelands of Alaska. All that time spend in the dank, dark cold was quite enough, so he moved far, far away to the slightly-less-cold state of Michigan and now continues to seek out warmth by making others laugh.  From role-playing games to spinning tall tales, he's always been a storyteller. These days he writes about funny and fantastical worlds set just beneath the surface of our own and works from home assisting in the day-to-day operations of Novel Publicity and raising his and Melissa's sassafras daughter, Phoenix. Find out more on his website www.falconstormbooks.com or by social media: Tsu, Tumblr, YouTube, or GoodReads.