3 Free Online Grammar Checkers

Online grammar checkers are useful when you don't have a teacher on hand to proofread your writing for you. In some ways, an online grammar checker is even better than a teacher because it can tell you how to correct your mistakes in just a couple of seconds. Teachers take much longer to provide corrections. In business and the working world, emails have to be sent fast but they also have to be error-free.

Draft of the Declaration of Independence with corrections (1776)

Grammar checkers are also much cheaper than hiring a professional editor. A variety of online grammar checkers are free or inexpensive to use with a yearly subscription. To save you the trouble of searching and trying every grammar checker that Google suggests, here is my list of the some of the best free grammar checkers I have found online.

I also tested each of them with a random collection of sentences to see how well they would perform with English as a Second Language errors. Remember that language is very complex, so the performance of a grammar checker based on a single test should not deter you from trying each of these grammar checkers for yourself. Also, remember that grammar checking technology is improving day-to-day. What seems imperfect today is just a snapshot of an evolving technology that is bound to improve with time.

Here are the sentences I used for my test:

James Bond's Hospital offer health service for everyone in the whole world. I went a short trip to Busan before the new semester starts. The main difference between EMTs and Paramedic is the level of training. It's a lot of Anglophone who don't speak French. I'm that person who loves to work hard.

1. VirtualWritingTutor.com

The Virtual Writing Tutor online grammar checker is free to use. You can check short texts (500 words) for grammar, spelling, and other errors without becoming a member. With an account, you can check up to 3000 words at a time for free. Membership is necessary to save your texts and track your progress in the error correction game. You don't have to subscribe to the newsletter if you don't want to, but you will miss out on free stuff and other interesting offers if you don't subscribe.

Using the test sentences, the VirtualWritingTutor.com grammar checker performed very well. It caught 8 errors, with no false alarms or bad feedback. One drawback is that you have to scroll down to see the results of the grammar check. Some people might prefer to see the feedback closer to the textarea. However, this website is intended to "tutor" students, so it tries to make corrections memorable.    

2. GramCheck.com

GramCheck.com is another free grammar checker that you can find online. It is a little slower that the Virtual Writing Tutor and doesn't catch as many errors, but it has some very nice features. One big advantage is that it displays feedback next to the text being checked. It also has a corpus-based check that is slower still, but is supposed to provide a more thorough analysis. Unfortunately, it was not able to find and correct any more errors.

GramCheck.com grammar checker caught one mistake but did not provide the right correction. It is not correct to say "I went to a short trip." "Trip" and "voyage" usually take the preposition "on."

 3. SpellCheckPlus.com

SpellCheckPlus.com is also a free online grammar checker, but it has more advertisements than the first two, making it more confusing to use at first. It has one nice feature in that the first two don't have. It colour codes the errors it finds and shows the corrections in two ways: by hovering over the highlighted error, and by scrolling down to the bulleted list of corrections below. 

 Unfortunately, it performed the worst of the three on this particular test. It caught one error but misinterpreted it as a conjugation error instead of a number agreement error, providing bad feedback. It also flagged "Busan" as being potentially an incorrect spelling of "Pusan." It isn't. Koreans now regularly spell "Pusan" as "Busan." It is the new standard spelling.