Grammar Checker

About the Grammar Checker

A grammar check is only useful if it leaves your writing sounding like you. Plenty of them do not: run a paragraph with any personality through one and it comes back smoothed into the same mid-Atlantic corporate register as everything else, with the fragments joined up, the contractions expanded and the one good sentence flattened.

This page corrects and stops. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, subject-verb agreement, tense that shifts halfway through, a doubled word your eye skated over. The register you wrote in stays where it was. So do your proper nouns, your figures, your quoted passages, your code, your paragraph breaks and your one-line paragraph, which was a choice.

Spelling is a setting with four positions because the default matters more than people expect. British and American differ on far more than a few -ise endings; they part company on punctuation inside quotation marks and on which collective nouns take a plural verb. Indian English is its own convention rather than a variant of either, and it keeps lakh and crore rather than converting them into something a reader would then have to convert back. There is also a position that leaves your spelling entirely alone and fixes only outright misspellings, which is what you want when you are editing somebody else's writing and the variety is not yours to choose.

The second setting controls how far the correction reaches. On its default it will not touch a sentence that is merely clumsy, because a clumsy sentence is not an error and rewriting it is not proofreading. Widen it and it will also untangle sentences that are genuinely hard to follow — a clause nested three deep, a pronoun with nothing to attach to, a subject that has gone missing by the time the verb arrives.

Turn on the list of changes when the corrections matter more than the corrected text: reviewing somebody's draft, or checking that a fix did not introduce a new mistake.

How to use it

1. 1Paste the writing you want checked — a sentence, an email, or a whole article.
2. 2Set the spelling convention. Pick “Leave it alone” when you are editing writing that is not yours.
3. 3Choose whether to fix errors only, or also repair phrasing that is hard to follow.
4. 4Run it, then compare the two. Anything you disagree with, keep your own version — you are the author.
5. 5Turn on “List what changed” when you need to review each correction rather than accept the whole result.

Questions

Is this as accurate as a dedicated grammar engine?

It is different rather than strictly better. A rule-based engine is consistent and will never surprise you, but it also cannot tell that a sentence is technically fine and still means the wrong thing. A language model reads for sense and catches errors of that kind, at the cost of occasionally changing something it should have left. Read the result before you send it. That advice applies to every checker of either kind.

Will it rewrite my writing to sound like everyone else?

It is instructed at length not to, and told explicitly that fragments and short paragraphs can be deliberate. If it has flattened something you meant, switch the reach setting back to errors only, which will not touch a sentence unless something in it is actually wrong.

Can it check languages other than English?

It will make a reasonable attempt at widely-written languages, but the spelling settings and the instructions behind this page are written around English conventions, so the results elsewhere are less dependable. There is a separate translation page if what you need is to move between languages.

How long a document can I check at once?

Up to fourteen thousand characters in one go, which is around two thousand words or five pages. The counter under the box tracks it. For anything longer, work through it a chapter at a time — you will read the corrections more carefully that way in any case.