A freelance writer whose business depends on delivering sparkling prose faces several unique challenges beyond the immutable truth that writing well is rarely easy.
Your humble blogger notes this from experience, having spent years writing everything from podcast scripts to science posts about sea otters to business proposals. I know better than most how sitting alone on a couch and sighing at a laptop can be work.
To keep your clients happy and to impress new contacts, your writing needs to shine consistently. But the amount of direct feedback you receive to help hone your craft and build your writing portfolio might vary from sporadic to almost nonexistent. This means you often have to catch and correct mistakes on your own—or, if you like polishing your drafts by reading them out loud, perhaps with help from your cat.
But the cat’s prowess at swatting out-of-place commas will only get you so far. You need a proofreader and editor who’s always available to help you catch and correct mistakes—and do it efficiently. This is where Grammarly comes in.
Here, we’ll cover how Grammarly works to analyze, improve, and refine your writing. Then we’ll turn to a few specific types of freelance writing where Grammarly Pro can help, from content and storytelling to research and sentence formatting.
Where does Grammarly work?
Grammarly works wherever you write. Its desktop application Grammarly for Windows and Mac can check and polish your writing in emails, messages, web browsers, and desktop apps like Microsoft Office and Slack. Need to get some writing done on a mobile device like a smartphone or iPad? Grammarly has that covered, too. And the same goes for your browser of choice, whether it’s Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge. You can also download Grammarly in the Chrome Web Store.
Grammarly for freelancers
Freelancers whose word count reaches into the five figures every week know it’s practically impossible to catch every last spelling and punctuation mistake single-handedly. Grammarly’s free offering helps you find and correct such typos quickly and conveniently—and it does much more.
For instance, a sentence that’s fine grammatically but structurally complex might still have room for improvement because it may confuse readers. Grammarly can flag such cases and suggest refinements for clarity, so you deliver concise copy that’s easy to follow.
This is particularly handy if your work spans disparate fields. As a freelancer writing for a general audience about the scientific projects of a prestigious aquarium, my work hinged on making complexity conversational without sacrificing critical nuances.
This same idea applies to an array of other roles. A project manager in the software world—whose work might involve translating the sales team’s goals into programming tasks for developers—values clarity every bit as much as a seasoned copywriter or public relations pro.
Next, let’s cover a few other examples where Grammarly Pro can be of great value to freelancers.
4 freelance writing tasks where Grammarly Pro can help
1 Content and storytelling writing
Whether your focus is hard-hitting news features, a blog on sustainable travel, or advice on training puppies, getting your content’s tone right is essential. It’s also key to developing and maintaining relationships with your best clients. But it’s not always easy to know if something you’ve written will land the way you intend.
Grammarly’s tone suggestions can help spot phrases that risk making the wrong impression and suggest alternatives. Say you’re reaching out to a client about an overdue invoice and have drafted this:
Draft: Tell me if you expect payment to take longer.
Imperatives like “tell me” may read as impolite, so Grammarly’s tone suggestions include starting with the word “please” or reworking the command to be more diplomatic:
More polite: Let me know if you expect payment to take longer.
Tone suggestions can help assure your writing comes off tactfully, confidently, and sincerely.
2 Plagiarism detection
For freelance writers whose work involves research, avoiding plagiarism is critical.
When you’re gathering information, it’s easy to copy down a note or a quote, or paraphrase, only to later forget where it came from (and that you didn’t come up with it). However unintentional, such mistakes can quickly sour client relationships and hurt your reputation.
Grammarly Pro’s plagiarism checker is there to safeguard against such a debacle. The plagiarism checker scours billions of web pages—including academic papers in private databases—for language similar to your draft. If you’re missing a citation, it can even provide a link to the matching source.
3 Clarity for multilingual writers
You don’t have to study a second language for long to appreciate that exact translation is delicate work, full of words that look deceptively similar to what you have in mind but that mean something slightly different or unrelated.
If you’re translating from French, German, Hindi, Mandarin, or Spanish, you can use fluency assistance in Grammarly Pro for language-specific suggestions. This can help you detect and fix those pesky false cognates with a specific eye toward the language you’re working with.
Grammarly can also improve fluency by helping to ensure your prepositions don’t get mixed up and that often overlooked words like “a” or “an” don’t go missing.
4 Adding final polish
When it comes to putting finishing touches on whatever types of writing you’re working on today, Grammarly offers plenty of features that ensure your final draft sparkles.
For instance, you want to avoid overuse of the same tired phrases—so Grammarly can help vary and strengthen your prose. And you can also see formatting suggestions to maximize your writing’s impact, perhaps by breaking up overlong paragraphs and adding bullet points. There are even types of feedback to help you with vagueness and hedging.
Your pocket editors
Grammarly’s free and Pro offerings are your pocket editors, ready with helpful tips and suggestions whenever and wherever you write. Such features are just a few of the ways Grammarly strives to be for you what you are for your clients: indispensable.
