My Grammarly Report Card

In May, I posted a review of Grammarly by Randy Ingermanson I received in my email. I was glad because I had downloaded the Chrome extension of Grammarly and had been using it for several weeks. His findings greatly matched my own and it is a useful program. I turned off the extension a few days ago because I was having a major drag in my browser and was trying to find what was causing it. I haven't turned it back on but once to use it. That's the nice thing about Chrome extensions.

Anyway, on June 1 I got an email from Grammarly that said it was a weekly progress report. I had the extension for at least a month and had not received such a thing in all that time. It puzzled me that I'd get one now. I was mildly surprised by the contents, which I share below.

ACTIVITY:  2128 words written
You were more active than 79% of Grammarly users.

MASTERY: 28 mistakes
You were more accurate than 62% of Grammarly users.

VOCABULARY:  722 unique words used
Your vocabulary was more dynamic than 84% of Grammarly users.

TOP GRAMMAR MISTAKES

1 Missing comma in compound sentence
35 mistakes

2 Redundant words
21 mistakes

3 Missing comma in compound sentence
11 mistakes

Let me say that I was rather impressed with my report card, but what I find amusing is that my vocabulary was more dynamic than 84% of their users. Really? I speak English, albeit American English, still we can understand one another fairly well. 

The other amusing things was the number of words I typed from May 25-May 31. Actually, that was words I typed using Chrome (mostly emails and blogs) and a few things I pasted into Chrome to use Grammarly. Nearly 3000 words in one week. It doesn't include any computer work.  And that's more active than three-quarters of their users. 

First, I'm rather annoyed at myself for not using more of those words on my stories. Shame on me. Second, I didn't know I was as good as I am. Good for me. 

I suspect that Grammarly is a very useful item for me in Chrome, but I won't be buying the subscription. I do think it is helping me  recognize my comma problems, but I don't think I actually the full version of the program. And as Randy Ingermanson points out in his review, you still need eyes on hard copy to get a really thorough job of editing. 

Speaking of which, visit my friend, Rae Ford's blog for a chance to win a free editing job on Ecstasy Editing.