Grammarly: Quick Grammar Fixes for Busy Writers

Picture this: you've spent an hour crafting the perfect query letter to your dream literary agent. You read it back, you're happy with it, you hit send. An hour later you reread your draft copy and spot "teh" in the second paragraph. Or a missing apostrophe. Or the wrong "their". The kind of mistake that makes you want to close the laptop and go lie down.

These are exactly the errors Grammarly was built to catch. And if you're writing anything important — emails, social media posts, your author bio, your book's back-cover blurb — having a tool that catches what your tired eyes miss is genuinely valuable.

What Is Grammarly?

Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that checks your writing for grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity, and style. It works as a browser extension, a desktop app, and an integration inside Google Docs and Microsoft Word — which means it's watching for errors across virtually everything you type, not just documents you deliberately open in a writing app.

It's one of the most widely used writing tools in the world, and for good reason: it works, it works everywhere, and it's accessible to anyone.

Who Is It For?

Grammarly is useful for almost every author, particularly for:

• The daily communication side of writing life — emails to agents, editors, publishers, and readers; social media captions; newsletter copy; website content
• Authors who want a safety net for anything that goes out into the world with their name on it
• Writers creating marketing copy where a single typo can undermine professionalism
• Anyone who types quickly and catches errors late (which is most of us)

The important caveat: Grammarly is not a deep manuscript editing tool. For that, you'll want something purpose-built for long-form fiction — like ProWritingAid, which we reviewed earlier. Grammarly and ProWritingAid serve different purposes and work beautifully as a pair. (More on this in the Verdict section.)

Key Features

Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation

The core feature — and it's reliable. Grammarly catches the kinds of errors that Word's spell-check misses: wrong-word errors ("their" vs "they're"), missing or misplaced commas, run-on sentences, inconsistent tense, and more. It's particularly good at catching the errors you make because you already know what you meant to write.

Clarity and Style Suggestions

Beyond pure correctness, Grammarly flags writing that's unclear or unnecessarily complicated — overly long sentences, wordy phrases, passive constructions that weaken your meaning. These suggestions are more stylistic than grammatical, and like all style suggestions, you should treat them as invitations to consider rather than commands to obey.

Tone Detector

Grammarly analyses the emotional tone of your writing — confident, formal, direct, friendly, concerned — and displays it as a reading. This is genuinely useful when you're writing emails that need to strike the right note: a reader complaint response, a pitch email, a delicate message to a collaborator. Knowing how your writing reads before you send it is valuable.

GrammarlyGO (AI Writing Assistant)

Grammarly's AI assistant can help you rephrase sentences, generate alternative wordings, adjust tone, and draft short pieces of text from prompts. It's less capable than dedicated AI writing tools, but having it integrated directly into the Grammarly interface means it's available anywhere Grammarly is active — which is almost everywhere.

Plagiarism Checker

Available on premium plans, Grammarly's plagiarism checker compares your text against billions of web pages and academic papers. For non-fiction authors writing about factual topics, or for anyone concerned about accidental similarity to existing content, this is a useful inclusion.

Works Everywhere

This is perhaps Grammarly's most practical advantage. The browser extension means Grammarly checks your writing in Gmail, in Facebook, in your WordPress editor, in Twitter, in any web-based tool you use. The desktop app covers everything on your computer. The Word and Google Docs integrations bring it into your document workflow. Very few tools have this kind of reach.

What We Love

It works everywhere, which makes it effortless to use. You don't have to remember to open it or paste text into a separate tool. It's just there, quietly checking whatever you're writing, and flagging issues as you type.

The free version is genuinely useful. Basic grammar, spelling, and punctuation checking at no cost — this is enough for most casual use cases and gives you a good sense of whether the premium features are worth it for you.

It catches the things you stop seeing. Familiarity with your own writing is both a strength and a vulnerability. Grammarly approaches your text fresh every time, without the assumptions your brain makes when rereading your own words.

What Could Be Better

Grammarly's fiction-specific suggestions can be frustrating. It frequently flags intentional stylistic choices — sentence fragments used for effect, unconventional punctuation, informal dialogue — as errors. Experienced fiction writers quickly learn to override these suggestions with confidence, but it can feel like the tool is fighting against your voice rather than supporting it.

It's less powerful than ProWritingAid for manuscript editing. If you want deep analysis of your prose — overused words, sentence rhythm, dialogue tags, pacing — Grammarly won't give you that. It's a surface-level check, not a developmental analysis. For serious manuscript editing, pair Grammarly with ProWritingAid, which we reviewed in depth here. They're genuinely complementary: Grammarly for daily writing and marketing copy, ProWritingAid for manuscript-level analysis.

Privacy considerations are worth knowing about. Grammarly processes your text through its cloud servers to provide suggestions. For most authors writing blog posts and social media captions, this is a non-issue. If you're working on sensitive material or have specific privacy concerns, it's worth reading their privacy policy before connecting it to your manuscript workflow.

Pricing

• Free — Grammar, spelling, and punctuation checks; tone detection; 100 AI prompts per month
• Premium — Around $20 AUD per month (significantly cheaper annually); full style and clarity suggestions, plagiarism checker, unlimited AI features, vocabulary suggestions
• Business — From around $25 AUD per user per month; team features, style guides, analytics

The annual Premium plan typically works out to around $145–170 AUD per year — reasonable for a tool you'll use every single day.

The Verdict

Grammarly is an excellent daily companion for the writing that surrounds your books — emails, social posts, marketing copy, website content, newsletters. It won't transform your manuscripts, but it will make sure that the professional communication that represents you to the world is clean, clear, and typo-free.

For deep manuscript editing, pair it with ProWritingAid — the two tools complement each other almost perfectly. Grammarly handles the everyday; ProWritingAid handles the serious craft work.

Our recommendation: Install the free Grammarly browser extension today. Let it run for a week and see what it catches. If you find yourself overriding most suggestions because they conflict with your established voice, that's useful information. If it's catching real errors you'd rather readers not see, the premium upgrade will pay for itself quickly.

Do you use Grammarly as part of your writing workflow? We'd love to know — and if you've found a way to make it work well with fiction writing, share your tips in the comments!