Grammarly

Use Grammarly's grammar check because otherwise, the Grammar Nazis will attack you in your sleep with your own terribly written paper, causing a plethora of paper cuts!

*This post is sponsored by Grammarly, The World's Best Grammar Checker at www.grammarly.com. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

As you all know, I am an English teacher at a small charter school. I have mentioned numerous times that my charter school is quite rigorous. One part in our curriculum that we pride ourselves in is our school-wide writing program. Every day, our students practice grammar and writing techniques. Starting in first grade, our students begin to learn the principles of grammar. They are able to label and diagram sentences, identify clauses and phrases, and are able to use mechanics and punctuation correctly. The reason we focus so strongly on grammar is to help them in their writing ability--if they know the basics, they will be able to do self-editing as they write. Our students write a lot!!! They are writing a paper every single month. Now, our writing curriculum is spread out, so they learn to write in the different subjects, but they are always working on a paper. I love this--practice makes perfect, I feel. The more they write, the better they'll be.

Typically, our students do their prewriting and outlining in class. Once they get those checked off by me (or whichever teacher they are writing for), they type up their drafts on a site called utahwrite.com. This is a wonderful website that allows students to type in their paper, then allows me to look at them all. The website automatically edits them for grammar (green highlights) and spelling (red highlights) mistakes. I can then go in and add in my own comments (yellow highlight).

When the students log back in, they are able to click on each of the highlights and tips will be provided for you. But, this website can be limited, especially because some of the site-generated tips are vague, especially if we haven't focused on that grammatical concept yet. Also, it's not a perfect grammatical website, so it misses quite a few grammatical, mechanical, and spelling mistakes.

That's where Grammarly comes in. All you do is take whatever you've written, a five-paragraph essay for 8th grade English, a college term paper, or even tomorrow's blog post, and paste it right in their homepage. Click "Check Your Text," wait less than 5 seconds, and it will find mechanical, grammatical, spelling mistakes, and much more!

The three main goals of Grammarly is to, "Instantly find and correct over 250 types of grammatical mistakes, improve word choice with context-optimized vocabulary suggestions, and avoid plagiarism by checking your texts against over 8 billion web pages."

It highlights your paper, just the same as my students' utahwrite.com account does, but if you compare the tip bubbles, Grammarly's is far more specific and detailed.

I am really impressed with Grammarly. I think it'd be a wonderful tool for English teachers, especially High School English teachers to have their students use this website. Now, the downside is that you would have to pay for accounts, but if my school is willing to pay for a subscription to utahwrite.com which helps students improve their writing, then I don't see why schools would reject this website in their budget!

I'm definitely going to use it for my blog posts, as well! I'm excited, because, although I'm an English teacher, I'm not a Grammar Police. I'm actually one of the fugitives running from the grammar law. So, (as a teacher) I rely heavily on websites like this to help me help my students. But now, I can also use it to improve my own personal writing as well. I suggest checking Grammarly out!