Why would you need a grammar checking software? Imagine receiving a business letter and you find it has a lot of spelling and grammatical errors. You would most probably think less of the sender, wouldn’t you?
Be reminded, though, that more than 60 percent of all business communications have some kind of grammatical error like apostrophe errors, missing words, wrong spelling and more. Most of the times we do not have the patience and time to edit or proofread our work or, much less, other peoples work for a thorough grammar check. Enter grammar checking applications. Now, imagine what the readers of your letters, e-mail, business communications and other written material would think if 60 percent of your work had mistakes.
Why would you take this chance of jeopardizing all those important documents when you could get help at reducing or eliminating errors with the two most popular grammar checking program from GrammarSoftware.co.uk and Grammarly?
Here, we compare, side by side, which of the two is better
Pros:
1) One price with free lifetime (supposedly) updates.
2) Instant check, Grammarly’s results are slow to come.
3) Works with almost ALL text editors in windows. I am writing documents in LaTex, and WhiteSmoke is very convenient, I just select the text in a text editor and hit F2 and my text is tested. Grammarly should make a plug-in like that. I tried to use the MS-Office plug-in of Grammarly and took the text to the website, sorry guys but this is a fail for me.
4) Whitesmoke is not too confused when I use LaTex markups in the text. Although, Grammarly is not that far behind.
5) WhiteSmoke annotates the text instantly, and you can click on the annotation you want for more information and automatic corrections. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed from all the Grammarly prompts, in WhiteSmoke, I can just do a visual scan a click on the items I want to address.
Cons (Grammarly pros):
1) No automatic citation check, however, Grammarly it appears to check only text available on the internet and not publications, e.g. a book (I could be wrong on this).
2) More thorough review and explanations.
3) WhiteSmoke is heavily marketed, Grammarly appears to be more professional in that matter, the website is much cleaner and organized.
4) Overall, Grammarly offers better results, but WhiteSmoke is not that far behind.
Conclusion
I still like Whitesmoke for the original reasons, it is not perfect, but it improves every few months. For example, Whitesmoke 2011 now works great with both 32bit and 64bit programs.
Suggestions for Grammarlly:
- Blink speed checking
- Annotations, so one can quickly visually go after the suggestions/problems that he/she cares about the most.
- A real windows interface.
To sum up, I want the WhiteSmoke’s interface, with Grammarly’s engine. That will be the ultimate tool: ultra fast, and ultra-accurate.
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