Do you hate writing? Do you put off writing that email, business, technical, medical or academic report? What about the proposal that has to be written in the next 24 hours? You hate it and know you do not write well.
I did!
I used to be like that. I have never liked writing. Those Economic and Politics 'A' level essays were a killer. I have done my best to avoid writing ever since.
Give me a keynote speech, a workshop to run, a facilitation session or a meeting; I have no problem. However, writing? Urgh!
If I was to tell you that in the just over the last month, I have written over 45 blogs. I love it and I am really enjoying writing them. It seems somebody is enjoying reading them. Over 2,000 people have viewed those blogs, 486 people have shared them and there have been just under 5,000 impressions. I do not know whether that is good or bad, but I am delighted.
So what has changed?
I have been searching for a solution for some time, as I have to write more and more documents. Then I found it. I found Grammarly.
Grammarly (@grammarly) has become my writing mentor. It is so simple to use. You have to either write in the app or you can paste in your writings and let it check your work and mark it out of 100.
You can set its style depending on what type of document you are writing. You can even switch on the plagiarism button to make sure you are not cheating too much. I love it.
It is 'experiential learning' at the desk. As you go through your document and check your written work, it helps you expand your vocabulary, improve the construction of your sentence, tells you when you are confused. You learn new words. You learn new things. It gives you confidence. It checks if you have missed words out. It stops those prepositions. It speaks English American and English English.
However, it is not all perfect. It puts a comma before 'and'. What little I learnt at school, I do remember my english teachers always telling me, "never put a comma before 'and'. I can live with that if that is the only thing that Grammarly does wrong. Has written english changed since I was at school?
Anyway, it has changed my life. I hope it can change yours.