After signing up for a Grammarly premium account, I wanted to make sure that I was getting the most out of my subscription. So I set out to find quick and easy ways to make Grammarly more useful and worth the monthly payments.
Is Grammarly Premium Worth It?
Grammarly premium saves a lot of time by enabling features such as auto-correction, auto-completion, customizable writing tones, and style checks. It also comes with fluency assistance, a handy sidebar for bulk actions, and easy shortcuts for mobile editing. These make it well worth the monthly fee.
Whether it’s responding to emails, chat messages, writing for school, or as part of your job, the ability to quickly fix up typos and punctuation makes Grammarly invaluable. However, if you want to take your Grammarly game to the next level, and get the most out of your premium subscription, then here are 10 Pro tips you can implement immediately.
Tip #1
Use Auto-Correct and Auto-Complete
And first up, you can reduce the time it takes to make corrections by using Grammarly’s AutoComplete and AutoCorrect features, which you’ll find by clicking on the browser extension. With the feature enabled, Grammarly will autocorrect spelling mistakes, and highlight those corrections with a gray dotted line.
It will also offer autocomplete suggestions while you’re typing, which you can choose to accept by pressing the tab key. The Grammarly editor offers a similar feature where you can accept all spelling and grammar corrections in one go, simply by clicking the option.
The only place where you may find this more of a hindrance than a benefit is when using the Grammarly keyboard on your phone. You can disable autocorrect by opening the Grammarly app and clicking on Keyboard Settings.
However, my preference is to leave it on, but also enable ‘revert autocorrect with a backspace’. So if I’m not happy with Grammarly’s correction, a simple tap of Backspace reverts the change.
Tip #2
Sidebar for Clarity
If you tend not to make use of Grammarly’s sidebar, then you’re potentially missing out on the opportunity for Grammarly to improve the clarity and readability of your text. You can open the sidebar at any time in your browser by clicking on the G icon or little green dot.
In this example, Grammarly offers an alternative to my sentence that reduces the wording by 18% while improving its clarity. Similarly, if you bring up the writing assistant by clicking on the G in the Grammarly Keyboard app, you can do the same thing.
Tip #3
Set Writing Goals
If you use Grammarly for work it’s worth taking an extra second or two to set Writing Goals, so whatever the situation, you can assess the tone of your writing before you hit send.
By using Grammarly’s Writing Goals, you can ensure the tone of your all-staff email or even a broadcast message in Zoom always comes across appropriately, without ever sounding abrupt or angry. One thing to note with tone detection is that it requires at least 150 characters for Grammarly to make an assessment.
Tip #4
Ignore Text in Quotes
If your writing requires you to frequently quote other authors or excerpts of text then, you may prefer Grammarly to ignore anything in quotes. You can set in the Editor by clicking on the menu in the top left corner of the screen, and choosing Editor Settings.
Tip #5
Set Writing Style
This brings us nicely on to the next tip, which is to define your global writing styles, which you can access by clicking on Suggestions Management here, or simply by going to Customize in your Grammarly Account Settings.
These are your personal stylistic settings. Disabling these options will prevent Grammarly from suggesting them when reviewing your text.
For instance, when writing the time, I prefer to include a space between the number and whether it’s am or pm, so I choose to disable this option. Similarly, I know it’s frowned upon, but I’ll also sometimes start a sentence with a conjunction, so turning off this option stops Grammarly from pointing it out.
Tip #6
Enable Fluency Assistance
Also in the Customize section of your Account is the Language tab. Here you can tell Grammarly if English is not your native language and you can enable the Fluency Assistant, which will prompt Grammarly to offer assistance to commonly misinterpreted word usage.
Such as the example that Grammarly gives here, where it recommends changing the word ‘do’ to ‘make’ so the sentence reads, “We’ve been able to make some progress here”. Personally, even as a native English speaker, I find this a really useful feature and like to have it enabled.
Tip #7
Drag & Drop Documents
To open documents in the Grammarly editor, of course, you can copy-paste from one to the other or import and export. However, a really quick alternative is to either drag and drop your document over your Grammarly shortcut or drag and drop it over your editor.
This will automatically open the editor and there’s your document ready to go.
Tip #8
Grammarly Definitions
You probably already know that double-clicking on a word will bring up a list of synonyms. However did you know you can actually click on any word from any website and Grammarly will provide a definition?
If this feature isn’t working for you, try disabling suggestions for the site and then re-enabling the option, and that should fix it.
Tip #9
The 38 Pixel Rule
If you’ve ever noticed that Grammarly fails to activate or offer suggestions in certain instances, then it might be because Grammarly ignores text areas, such as comment boxes that are less than 38px in height.
You can always manually activate Grammarly by clicking on the G icon or the green dot, usually to the right of the text box. And of course, if you don’t require Grammarly on a particular website, you can always deactivate from the browser extensions.
Tip#10
Mobile editing
Finally, Grammarly offers several ways to speed up correcting chat messages when using the Grammarly keyboard on mobile. For instance, you can always swipe left to ignore a suggestion or, if it’s a word Grammarly doesn’t recognize but you use a lot, you can add it to your personal dictionary and Grammarly will ignore it from that point onwards.
So those are ten tips for getting the most from Grammarly. But, if after trying out Grammarly premium you are still not satisfied, never fear. For I’ve written an easy step-by-step guide on how to cancel your subscription.
And for more tips like this, please check out my YouTube playlist of Grammarly tips. Hope to see you there!
