Free Grammar Check

Grammar Check helps improve writing style & grammar and teaches students to self-edit. Basically, it finds things that grammarians consider bad, highlights them, and suggests improvements. So writers can measure progress, it gives a "score" based on problems per document length, updated whenever the writer fixes a problem.

Since not all writing forms are equal, users can customize each element that Grammar Check checks. It works best for college-level essays. It doesn't improve content. And it's not much use for creative writing, since literature often breaks rules for aesthetic effect. These are the basic premises the program follows, in plain language:

1. Passive voice is harder to read and sometimes obscures meaning. Active voice is clearer and punchier. Grammar Check highlights all instances of passive voice and suggests how to rewrite them actively.
2. Wordiness. Don't use 3 words when you can say the same thing with 1. Grammar Check has a database of 973 wordy phrases, like with respect to, a considerable amount of, and as a matter of fact. It finds these and offers concise alternatives (concerning, many, in fact).
3. Sentence length correlates with sophistication of thought. Writing with many short sentences is usually simplistic, while preponderantly long sentences suggest convoluted thought, and if sentences are all about the same length, writing sounds soporific. Grammar Check provides a sentence variety score (using standard deviation) and average words per sentence.
4. Transitions help organize ideas. Text with few transitions is hard to follow. Based on analysis, writing that has less than 1 transition per every 4 sentences may be confusing. Grammar Check checks your document for 188 common transition words.
5. Academic Style. As a college writing teacher, I often find myself scribbling "be more specific" or "be more tentative" on student essays. Grammar Check checks your document against for casual or extreme language.
6. Nominalizations. Non-root form words (e.g., improvement or improving instead of improve), when overused, can bog down writing. Grammar Check highlights words with common nominalized endings ("-ization", "-ability", etc.) so you can pinpoint unnecessarily dense sentences.
7. Grammar is, quite simply, a bunch of rules writers follow. As a teacher, I've spent many a Saturday correcting grammar. Grammar Check searches for 6,239 errors in about 0.144 seconds.

There are many more rules of grammar thumb: prepositions at the ends of phrases should be dealt with, to usually avoid split infinitives, and following parallel structure. But many of these have exceptions, and I felt including checks for them would make the tool less efficient and consequently less useful.

Make the Project Better

The Grammar Check database has 8,060 grammar rules currently, not including algorithms for identifying passive voice and analyzing sentences. Help improve the comprehensiveness of this tool by adding more grammar rules. Go to the submission form and enter a grammar error. If it doesn't yet exist, it will be added to the database after approval.