Blogging on Chrome OS: Optimizing English texts linguistically

Introduction

If you run a blog, it can be helpful to have a tool that checks your posts for spelling mistakes and correct grammar as you type. Especially if, like me, you are anything but perfect at it. 😉

In this post, I want to introduce you to a few tools that I have been using for this purpose on Chrome OS enthusiastically over a long period and can warmly recommend them to you!

The spell-check of Google Chrome

If you use the browser Chrome e.g., as a client for WordPress to write your posts, you can activate the integrated spell checker:

It’s free of charge and also suitable for English texts:

By default, the “Basic spell check” is enabled:

As shown in the first screenshot above, you can also activate an “Enhanced spell check.” If you do so, you will be notified by Google that your input will be sent to Google to provide you with this feature:

I tested both. Especially the extended spell check is excellent and costs nothing.

But don’t you want to be sure that your entries are being sent to Google? Or are you looking for a tool that works without an internet connection? That’s possible with the following tool on Chrome OS!

The spell-check of Google Docs

A free alternative is Google Docs. As a web application, but also offline, as an Android app.

So, you can continue writing your post at the airport, even if the provided Wi-Fi is overloaded:

The app comes with a pretty good spell-check:

The spell-check of Microsoft Word

Do you have a Microsoft 365 subscription? Then you can use Word as a web application or offline as an Android app.

The app comes with a pretty good spell-check:

If you mark the text as English if your standard language is a different one, you will initially be offered to have Word download the English spelling so that you can carry out a spell-check:

Once this is done, language errors in your document will be marked:

The spell-check of Grammarly

Overview

I like to write my posts directly on WordPress, i.e., via the Chrome browser. For this browser, some extensions provide a powerful spell checker.

When I was studying the basics of blogging, I kept coming across Grammarly in forums and on Reddit. Native speakers also recommended it. So I thought to myself that this must be something good! 🙂

The free, unrestricted version includes only a simple spelling and grammar checker. That doesn’t sound so exciting at first. 😉

However, the premium versions (“Work,” “Personal,” “Academic“) also check the readability of your text, suggest a better vocabulary for the passage in question, check whether the style matches the genre and whether the text is plagiarism. These are potent functions, but they cost a lot of money. Currently, the price for a yearly subscription for “Personal” is $139.95, which is $11.66 per month. If you decide on a monthly subscription only, it would be $29.95.

The usage

Once you’ve installed the Grammarly extension on Google Chrome and signed in with your Premium account, the extension will start working. Here’s the same text passage again:

If you now click on the red symbol at the bottom right, a special dialog from Grammarly will appear, which helps you to optimize linguistic inaccuracies:

As you can see there, Grammarly here also complains about a problem with the first sentence, unlike the tools mentioned so far.

I have been using Grammarly Premium for several months now and can only recommend it! Give it a try! 🙂

The spell-check of LanguageTool

The LanguageTool is quite similar to Grammarly since the user interface is modeled on it:

Besides English, it offers you some languages, such as French or German. I will come back to this in another post.

I like the LanguageTool, but I find the results at Grammarly a little better. You can see this from the fact that it remains calm at the first sentence of the sample text, unlike Grammarly.

Conclusion

There are several ways to check the voice quality of your texts under Chrome OS! 😉

The results are not perfect yet, which can be seen in my posts, as I am blogging despite a lack of time. :p (Blog overview) But technologies are always evolving. I find it very impressive what is already possible in this way.

Check out my presented tools and see if you like the usage and results. Then you can choose one or, like me, use several tools at once.

Are you missing a tool on this list? The tool that you use every day? Then put it in the comments! 🙂

Back to the series “Everything you need to know about blogging on Chrome OS.”

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