Review: Grammarly for Homeschoolers and Bloggers

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Marking my teens’ writing—after helping them improve it—is exhausting.  It involves evaluating their content, editing, proofreading, correcting, encouraging, and, finally, evaluating and grading.  Sometimes this whole process is too much for me.  And sometimes I want to pull in an outside authority who is not emotionally involved with my teens.

I love blogging, reviewing, and writing.  I carefully check my own work, of course.  Often simply reading it aloud and changing the formatting gives me the fresh eyes I need for something as short as a blog post, but once in a while I make some embarrassing mistakes.

And those are the two reasons why I want a proofreader: to help me correct the spelling, grammar and style of my children’s writing and to check my own as well.

I’ve tried using Grammarly, a proofreading program, and it’s beautiful.  It checks a piece of writing according to standards I set (casual, technical, creative, academic) and gives detailed explanations of any problems.  In fact, one could learn a lot about writing from this program.   What’s more, it’s an objective program, not mom, who’s correcting a piece of writing—and that can make a huge difference in a homeschool setting.

Unfortunately, when I had access to Grammarly for two months I did not use it often.  Mostly that was because I was offline for almost a month and it was our homeschool summer vacation.  Very bad timing.  When I did run my blog posts through it, however, I found a few subtle errors each time and was reminded of a few writing rules.  Having a personal writing coach was a satisfying experience.

Grammarly is a worthwhile investment for bloggers and for homeschooling moms of teens.

I’m considering buying a year’s subscription ($11.66 a month) once this crazy harvest season is over.  For my own writing?  Partly.  But also to mark my children’s writing more objectively.  As a busy homeschooling mom, sometimes I just don’t have the energy to deal adequately with my children’s spelling, grammar, and style as well as their content, organization, and creativity.  And that’s where Grammarly would come in.

Disclosure:  I was given a free two month subscription to Grammarly in order to review it.  A positive review was not promised and no compensation was accepted.