We’ve come a long way since the printing press. Personal typewriters were introduced to the market in the 1860s. Electric typewriters were available after 1910, and the QWERTY keyboard show up in the 1920s. There were several iterations of typewriters, but no major improvements until word processing machines which were a mere stepping stone between the typewriter and the computer. I remember having a typewriter that had a screen that would display a sentence and would print when the “enter” button was pushed. It also had a white-out option, which I used more often than I care to admit.
It was not until the 1980s that word-processing programs for computers hit the scene. They offered a complete visual of your document before printing! They also offer spell check. Spell check is not perfect, but it finds most mistakes. I was told to “send” the document to myself or close it and come back to it before printing to avoid finding an error after printing and having to reprint…especially if the document is long or the ink is low.
Spell check did not pick up variations of words, and hyphens, and had a difficult time with industry-specific words, but over time embedded spell check has improved. It now will ask about spelling variations, it also corrects punctuation. Spell check was limited to the program until Grammarly was launched in 2009. Check out what it can do in addition to checking spelling and grammar (of course):
- Grammarly corrects any content you create all over the Internet as well as word processing documents uploaded into Grammarly to check.
- Grammarly checks the tone of the message to make sure it is “feeling” like it should be feeling. For example, if you are writing a scholarly paper, Grammarly will assess the makeup of the content to ensure it is formal enough.
- Grammarly suggests ways to make your content less wordy.
- It notices redundancies.
- Once you have Grammarly installed on your browser, it will check all the work you do in 1A.
There will be some instances where you will want to “ignore” a Grammarly recommendation, but it catches so many opportunities, that it is worth having to make your 1A profile even more amazing! 1A holds all of your application information and Grammarly helps you make it error-free…that’s a win-win.
