In the past, high school teachers would emphasize sentence structure, punctuation marks, and grammatical corrections. Unfortunately, in the modern world, schools no longer emphasize writing skills. The reality is, however, that writing skills are essential not only for academic purposes, but also for achieving success in the workplace. This is clearly evident for the following reasons:
- Professionalism – An employee’s thoughts should be clear, organized and well-presented so that his/her colleagues and/or superiors can understand the message being conveyed, especially if the person aspires to become a manager. A person with poor writing skills will be red-flagged and deemed unfit for a managerial position.
- Communication – On a daily basis, an employee is expected to write notes, emails and reports. Good writing skills are required to communicate ideas effectively. A document authored by a person with poor writing skills may leave the reader with the impression that the writer is of low-level intelligence.
- Credibility – A presentation or document that is poorly written may result in the audience focusing more on grammatical errors than on the goal of the presentation. Poor writing skills may portray the presenter as being ignorant and not capable of presenting or leading a new idea.
- Consideration – Having virtual teams in different locations has made it more critical for an employee to present his or her concepts and ideas by writing emails and/or by offline communications. Poor writing skills would not help in conveying the correct message, and make it almost impossible to manage offshore teams.
As we know, it is essential to have excellent writing skills; therefore, I am providing my feedback about an app which I came across. Grammarly is an app which checks grammar, spelling errors, incorrect punctuation, sentence structure, and misused words.
Grammarly helps to fix tricky spelling, for example, the words “their” or “there”. It also helps to correct punctuation wherever it is required. Grammarly also improves the text by suggesting appropriate words, for example, “terrified” in place of “very afraid”. It saves a lot of time by proofing and finding the errors in an email or report, and it improves the text to make it flawless.
Grammarly provides a weekly writing update report which covers four parts:
- Productivity – How many words were checked in the past few weeks for you in comparison to those checked for other Grammarly
- Mastery – How many alerts were given for your text and how accurate the text was as compared to other texts written by other Grammarly
- Vocabulary – How many new or unique words you are using on weekly basis as compared to new words selected by other Grammarly
- Top 3 mistakes – Grammarly alerts you to the top 3 mistakes found in writing overall. For example, Grammarly may highlight missing articles or missing periods.
For any subscriber, Grammarly provides a free account or a paid premium account, which is reasonably affordable when paid annually. Both the free and paid accounts provide critical grammar and spelling checks. The Premium account additionally offers:
- Advanced checks for punctuation, grammar, context, and sentence structure
- Vocabulary enhancement suggestions
- Genre-specific writing style check
- Plagiarism detector that checks more than 16 billion web pages
- Passive style check
- Explanations of grammar rules
- Definitions and synonyms via double clicks
Please realize that Grammarly is not a substitute for human proofreading. Only an expert in English can provide the highest level of proofreading. At Touro College, students can consult with the Graduate Division Writing Center, located on the 2nd floor of the academic building at 320 West 31st Street. There you will meet a qualified English as a Second Language professional who will gladly work with you and give you feedback to improve your writing skills.
Use Grammarly for initial writing assistance and then contact a qualified English as a Second Language professional to perfect your written text.
Please provide your feedback or comments on this and any other article on Touro GST’s blog. Please also let us know by emailing me as to what else you would like to learn about in future blogs.
I look forward to seeing your comments on this article about writing skills.