Steve Dotto here.
Thanks for spending time with me today.
Today, we’re going to talk about a tool that overcomes some of our inadequacies, more
specifically some of my inadequacies.
You might not have the same inadequacies as I do but I have one glaring and profound inadequacy.
I make a lot of grammar and spelling mistakes when I write.
I think it’s my nature that I’m in a rush and as soon as I finish writing something,
I proofread it too quickly.
I also have very poor spelling habits.
I went to Catholic boys’ school, Our Lady of the Bleeding Knuckles and they weren’t
all that interested in teaching us really good grammar and really good spelling.
I rush throughout it, I want to get it out and get onto the next thing and I’m a solo-preneur.
I work by myself so having somebody proofread it is an imposition.
I have to send it to somebody and ask them to proofread it for me or I have to slow down,
be patient and check it myself, none of which I’m really good at.
Consequently, I often send out my newsletter or make a post with spelling mistakes and
grammar mistakes, and those who care about me, those who love me, shake their heads in
disappointment on a very regular basis as they say, “Steve, I just read your newsletter.
What did you do that for?
Did you not proofread it?”
I look at them and say oh, I proofread it, sir.
I did.
Of course, I’m lying.
So I knew I had to do something.
I had to raise my professional image somewhat.
In respect, the people that I’m communicating with, frankly it comes down to respect, doesn’t
it?
So I found this tool called Grammarly and Grammarly is the world’s best grammar checker,
at least that’s what they say in their advertisement.
They give you ten reasons you’re going to love Grammarly and they’re all here.
They check 250 points of grammar.
They review your copy.
They catch your spelling mistakes.
They catch your little punctuation errors.
They do all those sorts of things and they do it for a fairly reasonable amount of money.
So I thought I would sign up for the free trial and I actually bought Grammarly.
It’s a tool that I’ve paid for and bought myself.
I’m going to show you how it fits.
Now the cool thing is even though I don’t think does an unbelievable outstanding job
of doing my proofread but it’s embarked me on a new process which is working for me.
So it really works.
Even though it doesn’t quite do as much as I wish it would, it still does more than
enough to make it worthwhile.
So let me show you Grammarly.
Basically, once you’ve bought Grammarly and paid for the subscription—I’ll tell
you right upfront how much it costs.
It’s not the cheapest Web 2.0 service on the planet.
It is $29 a month if you just buy it monthly.
I paid an annual plan.
I paid $140 for the year.
Now this is the magic.
Because I spend $140 on it, I use it every time because I don’t want to waste the money.
It’s how your brain works.
Now every time I write anything, I go into my Grammarly.
It’s just a web-based tool.
You just paste it onto a window like this and then it goes through that document and
it finds all of the different things that you might have said wrong, spelled wrong,
or written in composition.
Now this isn’t actually one of my documents.
This is a sample document that they used to show you how they catch things but it’s
a better document to show than one of mine because mine have pretty much the same mistakes
over and over again in the same area.
As you go through, all of the mistakes are underlined and then here in this side bar,
they tell you what the problem.
“For years” is missing a comma so all you do to correct it is just click on it and
it adds the comma.
You can undo that if you choose later.
You can choose to accept or reject their idea of what is wrong.
Here we probably have a bit of a run-on sentence, a double negative, “I don’t have no a
lot of money either.”
Well, it’s really poorly done.
Does it fix it?
No, it just describes it here.
So what it does is it goes through and it describes the grammatical mistake that you
have thrust upon the reading public.
Now here’s where it works for me though.
I read through it and because it presents it in a nice big type, I can see right away
all of the problems down the side but it’s become a process where I write what I write—and
mostly I write in Evernote.
I do most of my writing in Evernote so I have a nice digest of it—and then I copy it into
here before I paste it into whatever blog or whatever email I’m actually going to
be sending.
So I go through it and what this does for me is it slows me down.
It allows me to slow down and read through it.
They’ve got all sorts of mark-up tools so you can actually see what’s turned on.
Spelling is turned on.
Contextual spelling is turned on.
Grammar is turned on.
It just slows me down.
The underlines, of course, cause me to pause, reread that sentence and quite often they’ll
find things that I’ve written because I’ve written it awkwardly.
It allows me to stop and think and then correct it.
Quite often I’m not even accepting their corrections but I’m rewriting that sentence
because I recognize that I can do it better.
The key is it’s because I spent $140 bucks on it that I use it.
I want to get every last nickel of use out of that $140.
Now it has some other tools as well that I want to talk to you about besides just the
grammar checking which does, as I say, work quite well for me.
I want to show you their plagiarism tool which is really valuable.
I’m going to paste in some copy here.
This is some copy that I’ve used for an email but I’ve also used it in a blog post
in the past.
Now if we go into their pop-up here, we can turn on Vocabulary use which will include
and talk to us about using vocabulary, repeating words, maybe suggest to us some better words
but this is another tool that you should think about using on an ongoing basis, especially
when you’re not the one doing the writing.
If you’re hiring somebody else to write for you, you have no way of knowing if they’ve
also used that content and delivered that content to somebody else or indeed if they
maybe even lifted it off somebody else.
If we take a look right here, see how this whole thing comes up as a warning, this whole
sentence here?
That’s because if I take a click on it, it’s actually been used before online.
This is being plagiarized.
But in this particular case, it’s being plagiarized from me.
This is from my own website in a blog post that I have on my own website.
It tells you that as well.
This is really cool though.
Hand in hand with plagiarism is the fact that we’re often citing sources.
If we’re doing writing and we want to give proper credit, especially if we’re doing
academic writing—obviously, we have to give credit—they give you a proper format for
citing this if you choose to.
So if you were going to use this sentence, if you wanted to use this mark-up like the
APA or the Chicago system for the different citations, this is the way that you would
cite it.
You would cite it here it under APA or here, this copy here, under Chicago.
So if you were doing academic writing or you’re writing quasi-academic papers and you wanted
to properly cite and source different quotes that you’re using in your documentation,
this is a tool that again helps you keep your head above water and keep it legitimate.
It also warns you if you might be straying into the world of true, full on plagiarism.
All in all, Grammarly probably does 80% of what they claim to do on the homepage.
They do a good job but for me, engaging them in the process means that my writing is cleaner.
It certainly has less mistakes.
It certainly is probably legally in better shape, if I ever did run into trouble.
I think it’s one of those tools that, as I say, overcome some of my own personal limitations
quite nicely.
All of that for about $140 a year, I think it’s money well spent.
I hope you found time with us today well spent and if you have, please subscribe to our videos.
We always produce one new video here each week on productivity.
Of course, drop by DottoTech.com.
We’ve put on productivity courses and we’ve got a weekly radio show.
We’re just a fun, fun gang of people.
Thanks for spending time with me today.
We’ll see you next week.
[END OF VIDEO My Virtual Proofreader – Grammarly 8:16]