Protect your professionalism, give Grammarly® a go

With a 2:1 in English literature under my belt and over 6 years’ experience of penning job adverts, you’d think by now that my written skills would be near perfect but after writing for 7 hours a day occasionally selective vision takes over! Thankfully I found Grammarly, and my world suddenly became a more accurate place.

Marketed as the ‘World’s Most Accurate Grammar Checker’, Grammarly is an app that you can add to your Microsoft Office and Outlook to help improve your written content. You can even get it for the internet browser Google Chrome too if you’re writing on the web. It’s more than just your typical checker, as it hunts for both punctuation and contextual spelling errors. I’ve found it to be an absolute lifesaver!

There’s nothing that can turn off potential employers quite like an error-strewn CV. Many will throw away such applications without a second thought, simply because bad spelling or bad grammar is bad professionalism. But spelling and grammar catch recruiters out as well as job seekers.  If you want to give a professional impression from the start spelling the word shift wrong (and that’s happened) will inevitably lose you potential quality candidates.

Grammarly supports me every day, as I write the job advertisements for the many job boards that Candidate Source post across. I simply click one button and ta-da! It highlights any incorrect spelling, grammar, punctuation, word choice and style mistakes in my writing. I then have the option of amending the conflicting word/sentence or opt to keep it as it is.

Although it is a massive improvement over Microsoft Word’s default spell-checker, Grammarly isn’t perfect. I always remember, whilst proofing my work, to always re-read the sentence, as Grammarly can misinterpret what I am trying to convey. You must remember it is only a piece of software and not a human, and in my case, a human with a degree in English Literature!

Grammarly has been a great help to me, even in its ‘free’ version offering. There is also a ‘paid’ version which I can’t speak for, but I can wholeheartedly recommend the free option. It doesn’t matter how good of a writer you think you are, I think everyone needs Grammarly in their life, just as that extra layer of protection, spotting the slip-ups that can really damage your professionalism. Give it a go!