Advice/Help Any good grammar checkers for creative writing these days?

Phidippus

New Member
I've been looking for one. - And before you say 'your eyes', yes, I know. I do check my posts over myself. But it helps me to get a different perspective, even if it is artificial.

I know a lot of what's out there, if not all of them, are working off genAI which seems very faulty, and also not something I'd personally like to engage with very much. Are there any that don't use genAI in particular very much or it's an opt-in thing that still work well? I guess a more basic one is probably what I'm looking for, all considered. Grammarly exists, but people are saying that it's gone downhill.
 
Are you talking about basic misspelling or checking over sentence structures?

If it's the former, I've found that copy/pasting my replies into Google Docs allows it's spellchecker to do a once over on my words. It's free and only takes a little effort. Another editor, like LibreOffice or Word will do the same thing if you're concerned about their cloud services saving your stuff.

If it's the latter, I...honestly haven't looked for anything that'll check weird sentences for you. The programs I mentioned will suggest alternative wording sometimes if your structure is strange.
 
This might not be the answer you're looking for, but: Text To Speech. I was raised on the principle of reading your writing to yourself aloud, but even then, I feel we as people miss things. For that reason, I let text to speech read my writing back to me and edit as needed.
 
Are you talking about basic misspelling or checking over sentence structures?

If it's the former, I've found that copy/pasting my replies into Google Docs allows it's spellchecker to do a once over on my words. It's free and only takes a little effort. Another editor, like LibreOffice or Word will do the same thing if you're concerned about their cloud services saving your stuff.

If it's the latter, I...honestly haven't looked for anything that'll check weird sentences for you. The programs I mentioned will suggest alternative wording sometimes if your structure is strange.
Ideally both. I do recall a friend talking about the google docs method. Thank you!
 
English grammatical rules are for the devil himself. There are so many obtuse rules that if you actually knew proper grammar, then most posts would be riddled with mistakes. But the easiest way to check for mistakes is to learn the actual rules. No way any machine actually knows how to check and contextualize english grammar rules properly. And the best news is these rules are so stupid and worthless, that no one cares to figure out if you're messing up except for English language students with no use for their degrees.
 
This might not be the answer you're looking for, but: Text To Speech. I was raised on the principle of reading your writing to yourself aloud, but even then, I feel we as people miss things. For that reason, I let text to speech read my writing back to me and edit as needed.
Another flavor of this: read your writing to yourself, but in reverse sentence by sentence. So, read your last sentence out loud, then your second-to-last, etc.

It breaks you out of the flow of your own prose and makes it easier for you to spot grammatical errors (or even just typos!)
 
Another flavor of this: read your writing to yourself, but in reverse sentence by sentence. So, read your last sentence out loud, then your second-to-last, etc.

It breaks you out of the flow of your own prose and makes it easier for you to spot grammatical errors (or even just typos!)
Whoaaaaa I HAVE to try this! I've been saved so much by reading aloud, and honestly I find it quite fun too, so this I'm eager to try!
 
Whoaaaaa I HAVE to try this! I've been saved so much by reading aloud, and honestly I find it quite fun too, so this I'm eager to try!
I hope it works for you! It's one of my all-time favorite writing tips; got it from a high school Creative Writing class and then turned around and used it when I was a writing tutor in college. As someone whose eyes glaze over when I have to reread my own work, it's a great way to do some quality control.
 
I've heard Grammarly is good, but it's not free. I've been relying on my browser's spell check 🙃
 

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