Hello everyone! At GV, English is the language of a big portion of our content and communication. While Lingua has the larger part of the community, we do translate mostly from English, as well as communicate in English. In my point of view, the better English we collectively practice, the better translations get, in addition to our communications.

As you might know, although I’m comfortable expressing myself in English, it is not my native language. I still do mistakes. A wrong preposition here, a typo there. Most probably even natives are the same, to a lesser degree. After all, we are human, we make mistakes.

There, of course, English spell checkers in million formats and platforms, but I always had this feeling of not being a strong writer because of grammar. And I never really found a tool to fix both grammar and spelling, until I came across Grammarly, where I tried both the free and premium variations.

When you sign up, you are offered four types of English; American, British, Canadian and Australian. After choosing one of them, and go on with your writings, you will see critical issues redlined for you to fix. Critical issues vary between misplaces commas, repetitions, spelling mistakes, etc. I find it really useful when I process Edit Requests, when I write posts on GV, my emails, my writings generally speaking.

The premium version is not cheap! But it displays many complex grammatical issues, as well as its ability to expose things like plagiarism. In the desktop mode, you can adjust your writing to make it suited to your purpose; general, business, essays, etc, which will be of great use to our editors and subeditors. It can be even used on Google Docs now! I would love to discuss the potential of using it with the newsroom editors and our subeditors team.

I imagine if at least GV contributors began installing the free Grammarly, we will have better writing collectively, and save the time of newsroom editors and sub-editors, leading to a better GV experience! I know that I'm now a much better writer over the years of using it.