Avoid grammatical errors in your club communications
When you’re sending an email update to your members or writing a report to share on your club website, the last thing you want is to create confusion by letting mistakes slip in. And while the spell-checking tools in Office and in browsers do a reasonable job of spotting simple spelling errors, they’re not so useful at highlighting grammatical gaffes. This is where the Grammarly tool comes into its own.
Install Grammarly for Microsoft Office
How you install Grammarly depends on which programs you use to write your club communications. If you use Microsoft Word, download and install the Grammarly add-in from www.snipca.com/33919. Now open Word, click the Open Grammarly button on the toolbar (see screenshot above right), then follow the instructions to sign into your account. Next, start typing your document as normal. When Grammarly spots a spelling mistake or thinks it can improve your style, the text will be underlined in red and added to a list of possible errors in the pane on the right. To review these, click each one in turn, then click the suggested replacement word (in green) to accept the recommended change. Alternatively, click the three dots for a brief explanation of why Grammarly believes an error has been made.
The Grammarly add-in for Office also works with Outlook, but not Powerpoint or Excel – we’ll explain below how to use Grammarly to check text in these and other unsupported programs.
Check grammar in Gmail
Grammarly is also available as a browser extension, which lets you check any communications written in Gmail and Google Docs, as well as other online services such as Facebook and Twitter (useful for a quick check of any club announcements you’re making on social media). To install the extension, go to the Grammarly home page ( www.grammarly. com), then click the ‘Add to Chrome’ button (if you’re using a browser other than Chrome, the button will be worded differently).
Sign into your Grammarly account when prompted, then restart your browser. Unlike with Office, Grammarly’s suggested changes don’t appear in a separate pane. Instead, simply click an underlined word to see the suggested edit, along with an Ignore button to skip the supposed error (see screenshot above right).
If you use Google Docs, Grammarly works with that too. The Google Docs extension is currently in beta, but we haven’t experienced any problems when using it. You will, however, need to enable it separately (Grammarly will display a message asking you to do this when you open Google Docs).
Use Grammarly with any software
For other programs and tools, such as Libreoffice, you’ll probably need to download the Windows version of Grammarly ( www.snipca.com/33920). This runs as a standalone program, into which you can paste text from documents, spreadsheets, slideshow presentations and more. Grammarly will then underline misspelt words and grammatical errors in the same way its browser and Office versions do. The ‘Overall score’ option is particularly useful. Not only does it give you a score out of 100 based on readability, grammar, etc, but it also tells you how long it will take the average person to read the text to themselves and out loud.
Add words to your dictionary
Grammarly doesn’t always get it right - sometimes it will flag unusual surnames or terminology as incorrect. In these instances, click the underlined word, then select ‘Add to dictionary’ so the word won’t be marked as incorrect in future. If you make a mistake, or simply want to see which words you’ve added to your dictionary, go to the Customize section of your online Grammarly account at www.snipca.com/33921. Hover over a word and click the bin icon to remove it from your dictionary.