Search For A Better Grammar Checker
Grammar is important
“The past is always tense, the future perfect.” — Zadie Smith
I am terrible when it comes to Grammar. I thought I had found the answer to the ultimate question.
Unlike “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy “by Douglas Adams, the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything,” calculated by an enormous supercomputer named Deep Thought over 7.5 million years, isn't 42.
I thought the answer was Grammarly premium edition. I soon found out I couldn't have been more wrong. As I kept finding new errors that Grammarly missed, The missed error correction was the straw that finally broke the camel's back.
I had no choice but to stop paying the 30 dollars a month subscription to Grammarly and find an alternative,
I wanted to save overhead, so I decided to look at open-source editors. Likewise, I found that most grammar checkers are either online or Linux-based.
Likewise, I am familiar with Linux. However, all free grammar checker could be run not only on Linux., but also on Windows and macOS.
So now it’s time to change from my Microsoft Windows PC and over to my Linux PC.
So while I was on my Linux box, I found out that Apache Open Office has a Grammar checker for versions later than 3.0 available for Microsoft Windows, Linux and macOS,
The screenshot below with its clear label “Spelling and Grammar F7 implies that the OpenOffice word processor is functional, however testing revealed at best it is still a work n progress.
It could not catch any error in the
following sentence. “Mike mightily may ttry.”
Next, I tried an online Grammar checker.
It seemed to work well, but it was obviously a front end to Grammarly, and this exercise was in response to the unreliability of Grammarly.
Finally, I tried the open source grammar checker “The language tool.” This seemed to function as well as or better than Grammarly and was free.
The “Language tool” had versions for Windows, macOS, and Linux. I had to first unpin Grammarly from Chrome and then pin “The LanguageTool” plugin to Chrome.
I was soon free of a 30 dollar a month subscription fee, and an error-prone Grammar checker.
Conclusion
Why use a commercial grammar checker that cost money when there are just as good free grammar checkers that work just as well or even better than the paid for grammar checkers.
