Do you want to write more professionally? Are you making the kind of mistakes that you could easily correct yourself?
Level: medium •
Category: writing; grammar
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When I’m marking a student’s writing task or checking a friend’s important email, I’m often surprised that they don’t check their own work first. It’s the 21st century and there are a lot of mistakes that a computer can pick up easily.
There are two free websites that I would recommend: reverso.net and spellcheckplus.com
I tested them both by typing in the following text:
Lets see if this thing control my English is well. I am agree that need something like that for help my writting. I search a program but not find the sutable one.
Try it yourself by copying the text above and clicking the buttons below.
Reverso picked up seven mistakes and offered a good solution for six of them. For the other one, it knew something was wrong but it got the solution wrong.
SpellCheckPlus picked up eight mistakes and not always the same ones! Again, not all of the solutions were perfect but six of them corrected the mistakes well.
If I paste the text first into Reverso, and then into SpellCheckPlus, this is the corrected text I get:
Let’s see if this thing controls my English is good. I agree that need something like that to help my writing. I am looking for a program, but not find the suitable one.
It’s still not 100% correct but there are eight good corrections there!
Here’s the same text with my human input:
Let’s see if this thing checks whether my English is good. I agree that I need something like that to help my writing. I am looking for a program, but I haven’t found a suitable one.
So there you have it! The spell-check improved the original text a lot. If you use one, you’ll get better marks and look more professional.
One last mention: the software that I see advertised the most is Grammarly. It looks pretty good but to install the Chrome plugin you have to agree to letting it «read and change all your data on the websites you visit». Now, that’s not something I would personally agree to but feel free to give it a try!
