What’s With The Good Grammar?
What’s the ruckus about the good grammar thing anyway? What makes the good grammar idea palatable to begin with? Is it possible, just maybe, that today’s students are once again looking to educators for guidance on the good grammar that lies between going on to college or not? Did a friend lose a job over the lack of good grammar they demonstrated to clients, co-workers, or their boss?
The simplest and most common way to learn what good grammar looks like is by reading. Hit your library or join a Book of the Month Club to condition yourself to reading more often. Go yard-sale hunting for that childhood literature piece that is bound to take you back in time as you read it again from your present life’s perspective.
You can find countless books on the good grammar necessary to climb the corporate ladder or getting that acceptance letter from the University of Choice. By going to popular and well-known sites like Amazon for grammar resources, you erase any excuse you may have had at hanging on to your less than stellar, if not poor, grammar skills. Any of these books will help you along the road to developing good grammar. But like anything else that’s worth anything, these books have a cost.
It will cost you in the price of the purchase and in the time needed to read them. That’s just the way the learning experience works. If you want to master an area that you somehow missed picking up the first time around, the added cost seems to be like paying a penalty along with late fees and interest.
So why bother learning the good grammar? Vital grammar skills like putting together proper sentence and paragraph structure, punctuation, and using correct word meaning and parts of speech prove, in the mind of your reader, that you are articulate, prone to detail, and understand how and why to communicate clearly. These perceived skills can be among the subtle factors between succeeding or falling short of your goal. But in today’s fast pace of moving up, there may not be much time remaining in the day to learn these skills from another book added to an already book-riddled day. There is a more simplified way to go.
Touted as The World’s Best Grammar Checker, Grammarly is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to learning the good grammar necessary in today’s competitive academic, business, and professional world. This program is different in the way you learn to develop the good grammar skills you’re looking to gain.
While Grammarly checks your text for grammar, word usage, and punctuation on the run, the program also checks for spelling and vocabulary usage while you’re at the task of writing your paper. It really is that simple!
As you are in the process of writing, the Grammarly program is offering spelling suggestions when you have miss-spelled a word. A list of possible corrections for the miss-spelled word comes up, and you simply click the correct word from the list. By simply checking an error card option box, you can block the spell checker from marking unique or unusual words or names you use but don’t want to be annoyingly notified of the (known) error.
Along the way of checking for spelling errors, Grammarly generates word suggestions or “Synonyms” targeted at enhancing eloquence and improving word choice. This is done in the same way as making any other type of correction; by offering a menu of options you simply click from to make the change to an alternative.
Using Grammarly at establishing the good grammar is a learning experience within the program itself. By showing you options to choose from, you find that you are learning at improving your vocabulary and diction. It’s a kind of “tutoring” experience or on-the-job training session. You learn as you go instead of taking an added step of referring to an outside book that occupies valuable time and energy apart from actually writing your paper.
When all is done, you end up with not just a great paper, but added knowledge and a fresh understanding of what words are used when, where, how, and why. And as your diction improves, so does your ability to clearly communicate your message. The art of using words in their proper content is what paints the picture (your message) in the mind of the reader. The phrase a picture paints a thousand words becomes more than just a phrase. It becomes a skill. It’s the good grammar that paints the picture in your reader’s mind that says a thousand words to your reader!
