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Why Grammarly Helps My Writing
I’m not the best writer, but clients love my writing and people who comment love my writing style. I’ve been told that it’s inspirational, informational, and easy to read, and I attribute a lot of that to Grammarly. I do make the same mistakes over and over again. And i don’t know which pieces of copy on my blog have been run through Grammarly, so I’m going to pick a landing page and we’ll see what happens.
I don’t always listen to what Grammarly tells me. As a freelance writer, especially if you’re doing copywriting, you have the right to make choices that create an effect with your writing. You’re going to have a certain style that an editing tool like Grammarly will not agree with, so you don’t have to take everything it gives you and you don’t have to worry too much about the score it gives you.
Demonstration of Grammarly
Setting Up the Piece of Copy
This is the piece of copy I’ll use. I use the desktop version because I’m on my desktop, and as you can see I’ve been using it over and over again. I guess this number is how many mistakes there are, I don’t know, that’s the score they gave me. If I have a Word doc I’ll import it, but a lot of the time I write my blog posts in WordPress and my emails in ConvertKit, and those are the two forms of copy I check for grammar. I use Grammarly to catch mistakes, especially in my emails.
I don’t do it all the time, so that’s something I need to build into my schedule. I’ve sent emails and as soon as my husband reads one he says there’s a mistake in the first sentence. Oh well, that’s me. I am a mama of twins, so I blame that on being rushed.
Pasting the Copy and Reading the Score
I’m going to press new and paste my copy here, and I’m just going to do it in chunks. It has assessed my writing and given me a 75 overall, which I don’t even pay attention to, but it’s telling me right off the bat that I have to improve my spelling, grammar, and punctuation, which is always something for me. I don’t know if it’s because I grew up in a multi-language household. My dad spoke Danish to me and my mom spoke Spanish to me, so I don’t know if that had an influence or not.
For clarity, it’s mostly clear, which is awesome. For engagement, it’s a bit bland, which is surprising to me, but it’s a landing page and I didn’t put everything in the page. It’s all good with a style guide. I did not set any goals, so that’s something to consider if you do decide to use my special link from Grammarly that I’ll put in the description below. You might want to set some goals to help you with your writing.
Going Through the Suggestions
It’s suggesting I make this compound word hyphenated. In reality I would go into the back end of my original copy and fix it there, so I’m just going to show you the mistakes and how I would improve my writing. I don’t fix it here and then copy and re-paste it. This next one is too wordy. I wrote this landing page probably in the first or second year of starting my own blog and I was very wordy back then, so this could be shortened.
You definitely want to shorten your content even though you might be hitting a word goal. Let’s say your client piece needs to be 1200 words and you’re at 900, and you put this in Grammarly and it’s telling you to remove all this fluff. It’s filler writing that you don’t need, so I would definitely change this.
Wordiness and Commas
So it says “this free mini course will help you get paid to write online to earn an income as a writer,” and the suggested version is much clearer. I bet this is a comma that I don’t need. I have issues with commas, and I think a lot of writers do. It can be a bit subjective where you put your comma, and you don’t always have to follow what Grammarly says. I don’t, when it doesn’t make sense to me.
It suggests “desperately try” instead of “desperately trying.” I think it also wants me to form the action in a more concrete way, saying it’s wordy, so I would change it. Again, a comma probably doesn’t need to be there. Do you want to be a freelance writer but, sorry, I have to keep scrolling, it doesn’t need a comma before “but,” though it does need a comma before “or.” Then this tells me it’s probably too wordy and wants me to rephrase my sentence. It’s unclear and hard to follow.
Rephrasing Suggestions
The original is “whether you want to leave the job you despise or you want to find a way to make money from home, this free course can help make that happen,” and it wants to change it to “whether you want to leave the job you despise or find a way to make money from home, this free course can help.” So you just remove that part. It still has the same end result of what I want to say, and it just shortened it and made it clearer for me.
For content marketing, it suggests “relies on” and “relies upon,” again adding those prepositions. I have an issue with prepositions for some reason, usually use the wrong one. And i see “relies on” and “demanding,” but I don’t see “relies upon,” and I don’t know if I like that change. I would have to find a way to change this, and I’ll just say content marketing demands quality content. I would just snuff that out completely.
For “practically every business,” sometimes it wants me to change the word because I use “business” too much. I don’t like using “company,” so I’m going to keep it. For “keyword filled,” it wants it hyphenated.
Hyphens, Numbers, and Spacing
I don’t know if I would do that here. Here’s another rephrasing: “Google is cracking down on that and instead favors long quality content that users find helpful” becomes “Google is cracking down on that and favors long quality content.” That’s fine too, I like that. So for “long quality,” nope, I don’t want a hyphen, and for Google, nope, I don’t want to change that.
It’s going to want me to write out “six,” which makes sense. I would definitely write out numbers below 10, and for numbers after 10 you can just write the number, like 10 or 15. There needs to be a comma here. “Fast track” is probably hyphenated. This probably needs a comma too. “This isn’t going to teach you how to write, and it won’t teach you,” that’s fine, I can do that.
Oh look, there’s no space here, so it’s going to have me add one. I like things like that because that’s an oversight for me, so I like that it’s telling me I need to have a space. That’s nice.
Final Corrections and the New Score
So it’s changing this. I thought this needed a comma probably. “I’m a freshman, I started freelance writing from scratch without experience, and in six months, I was able to earn.” I’m going to keep that “six.” It doesn’t like that I end in a preposition, but as a writer you can end that way, so I’m not going to listen to Grammarly on that. Remove that comma, and it probably needs a comma here. Oh no, “to enroll,” no comma after “but” here, I bet.
I’ve really shaped up this content and it’s now giving me a score of 93. It’s telling me my writing is engaging and no longer bland, so it has already improved my landing page copy substantially. If I have the time to go back and change those space issues especially, and a little bit of the wordiness, I think it would really benefit my writing and showcase my landing page.
Why I Rely on Grammarly
My Main Grammar Culprits
Not many people actually go to the landing page. They go to my home page and sign up there, or they look at my blog post and sign up at the little form there, so this landing page doesn’t get a lot of views. That’s why I chose this particular one. You can see how easy Grammarly is, and you can choose not to follow it on everything it suggests.
For me, my main culprits with grammar are commas, prepositions, and a little bit of wordiness here and there, and I rely on Grammarly for those. With comma usage especially, I don’t always follow it, but it does help me with my writing. Especially if I want to write for businesses, I always run my client pieces through Grammarly because it’s a business piece of content and they want error-free writing. If you haven’t tried Grammarly, use my link below and try it out to see if you like it.
Grammarly for Client Work and Your Own Content
I really think it’s a necessary tool for freelance writing in my experience, especially for client work and especially if you’re going to start blogging on your own, building an email list, and creating your own products. Those all need to be edited.
Is that the only level of editing I would do? Like I said, I would definitely use Grammarly for my client pieces, but for client work I have other editing levels to make sure it is as close to error free as possible. In my course Write Your Way to First 1K, I share my editing process, which isn’t all just Grammarly. I’ll drop the link to that informational page so you can see if it’s something you want to consider.
Closing
If you really want to level up your writing and make a living out of this, Grammarly can help you, my course Write Your Way to First 1K can help you, and even Freelance Blogging in a Weekend can help, which is a writing course. I’m just really excited because I’ve been updating my content.
