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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]