Last Updated on February 6, 2020
I recently came across a post listing nine blogging tools bloggers should want in his or her arsenal. One in particular stood out for me.
BestTechie published an article titled “9 blogging tools you will wish you knew earlier.”
I’ve heard of several of the tools on their list. I use a few of them, including Evernote and Yoast SEO. (I’ll write more on Yoast in a coming post.)
But another item they listed caught my eye: Grammarly. I wrote back in 2016 that I was going to give it a test drive. I’ve used it ever since.
Grammarly offers both a free and paid plan and I still use the free option.
Wikipedia points out Grammarly is a Ukrainian technology company. Who knew? Grammarly is “a digital writing tool using artificial intelligence and natural language processing,” Wikipedia says.
Grammarly calls itself your “free writing assistant.” That’s true, I suppose, if you’re using the free version that I do.
What I like about it is that it is more than spellcheck. Sure, it watches for misspelled words and will underline any errors it spots with a red line. When you hover over a red line, a small window appears with suggestions and a link to explain what it thinks is incorrect. With one click, you can replace the error.
But it also looks at punctuation. Sometimes, I tend to overdo it a bit with commas. Grammarly catches most of the commas that aren’t necessary and alerts me to them.
On top of all of that, it also watches for grammar and syntax errors.
Consider this sentence:
The team will loose the game.
Grammarly immediately placed a red line under loose. When I hover over it, it produces a box telling me the correct word is lose, not loose.
Here’s what that looks like:

Simple spellcheckers can’t do that because loose is indeed a correctly-spelled word. But in that example, it just so happens to be the wrong word.
As I said back in 2016, “If there’s anything I hate more than grammar errors, it’s grammar errors that I make.”
I still feel that way. So of the blogging tools I rely on, Grammarly is at the top of my list.