By default, Chrome lets you know when it thinks you’ve made a spelling mistake by marking the offending word with a squiggly red underline.
And you can use Grammarly to check for basic grammatical errors in addition to spelling gaffes. A free account will show you “critical” issues and alert you to the presence of “advanced” problems without actually pointing them out. For that, you need to purchase an upgraded account.
In order to use the Grammarly site, though, you have to copy and paste your text from wherever you’re working into the Grammarly editor and then make your corrections. You can do that in Grammarly itself and then copy and paste back to your original editor, but you risk losing your original formatting. The other choice is to follow along in Grammarly and make fixes in your original editor.
As you might imagine, that can be confusing.
But if you’re writing on the web, as in a blog post, you can have the best of both tools courtesy of the Grammarly for Chrome, an extension for the Chrome browser. With this setup, you can leverage the power of Grammarly from within your online editor, be it WordPress, Tumblr, or any other web-based tool.
To get the Grammarly extension, either go to the Chrome Web Store and search for “Grammarly” or just go directly to the for Grammarly for Chrome page.
From there, click “ADD TO CHROME” and “Add Extension” in the resultant popup.
Chrome will do its thing and tell you that the extension has been “ADDED TO CHROME”:
Now you’re all set to use Grammarly anytime you write inside of Chrome. For instance, while I was composing this post, I put in a messed-up sentence, and my editor looked like this:
As you can see, Grammarly highlights your mistakes as you type, and, if you mouse over them, you can see more details. The “3” in the red circle in the lower right-hand corner tells you that you have three problems. If you click that circle, you can choose to edit your work in Grammarly:
Then you just make your edits, using Grammarly’s hints where appropriate. When you’re finished, click the “Back to Edit Post” in the upper left-hand corner to get back to your post.
The cool thing is that all the changes you made in the Grammarly interface persist in your edited post.
Grammarly won’t catch all of your errors, but it’s another tool that can help you feel more confident in what you write and publish the best material possible.
Happy writing!