Reviewing a tool for writing support - Grammarly

 The opportunity to review Grammarly came across my desk this morning, so I thought I would share this with you. Disclaimer: I have never been a big fan of tools like turnitin.com but have acknowledged the need for something like that at a certain academic level as a check and balance.

I experimented with Grammarly by copying and pasting from a blog post I wrote recently. You can also upload files.
The results are shown below in the screenshot below. Here are some brief observations:

Good:

• It recognised I stole the text from online, and from my blog - funny it did not find the getideas.org website where this was originally posted....
• It has picked up some glaring grammatical errors - and made me cringe at my 'blogging' writing style, thinking I will need to improve this to be able to write in a more academic way more consistently (was that a good sentence??)

Not so good:

• It is not happy with NETS.A - cannot recognize this format - hence at least one punctuation error listed because of this
• It is not happy with other capitalised proper nouns or acronyms eg GetIdeas

After sharing words like 'teacherpreneur' and teacherpreneurship' to the dictionary I finally ended up with a 66/100 score, with the comments 'weak, needs revision'. I did get a 'tick' for both writing style and vocabulary use - is that good?

Having this tool available BEFORE submitting work is an excellent support for the learning process. However the learner also needs to learn how to work with the tool to maximise this benefit.