If you’re like me, you may have come across a few Grammarly ads and commercials over the past few months. Grammarly, touts itself as the ‘The World’s Best Grammar Checker’. The question is, do real estate professionals need Grammarly?
What is Grammarly?
Grammarly is an advanced grammar checker more powerful than the spelling and grammar check found on Microsoft Word. Beyond spelling and basic grammar, Grammarly identifies confused prepositions, wordiness, plagiarism, overuse of passive voice and much more.
The Pros
- Grammarly will identify more errors than what can be identified by Microsoft Word.
- It gives suggestions on how to make your writing smoother and easier to understand.
- You can use Grammarly to check the appropriateness of your writing for different audience types (ie. business, academic, casual).
- It explains to you why your mistakes are incorrect and why your writing is unclear. In effect, Grammarly is more than a grammar tool, it’s a learning tool that can help you improve your writing.
The Cons
- Grammarly is not free. 1 month subscription costs $30USD.
- Grammarly is not infallible. It will make incorrect suggestions and miss mistakes.
- In proofreading tests, professional writers and editors consistently do a better job than Grammarly.
- You cannot call Grammarly for customer support. If you have an issue, you have to send Grammarly an email or post a question on a discussion board and then wait.
The Verdict: Do you need Grammarly?
Whether you need Grammarly or not depends on your brokerage. If you have a good writer on your team, Grammarly is probably an unneeded expense. If no one in your office is confident in their writing abilities, your office probably needs to outsource copy editing to a professional editor.
However, if you’re brokerage has a few staff members with fairly strong writing skills but no ‘Writing All-Stars’, Grammarly may be a worthwhile investment to your brokerage. A quick google search of brokerages in your local area will show websites with some great examples of poor writing that could have benefited from being proofread by Grammarly.
Purchase Grammarly or not, clear, understandable and error-free writing is imperative to building credibility with your customers.
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