FR-CA 

PT 

RU 

ES 

You can now listen to this article

Being able to express yourself by writing continues to be an essential business skill.

One of the best ways to demonstrate your insurance expertise is by writing articles describing a particular insurance question or issue and providing helpful information. There are more opportunities today to publish online than ever. A new article should be added to your agency website at least once a week.

The LinkedIn publishing platform is another great place for you to add articles that demonstrate your expertise. People want to do business with those they know, like, trust, and who understand what they are doing.

However, if you are like me, high school English might not have been your favorite subject.

You see, it is one thing to write an article, but something else entirely to be able to write an excellent article. Before you ever publish anything, you should ensure that it is free of spelling errors, grammatically correct, and appropriate for your intended audience.

Hiring an editor to do this can be expensive. Editing your documents can be a drag, especially if you are in a time crunch. Fortunately, there are online tools that can help. One of the tools I have used for several years to check all of my writing before publication is Grammarly.

Grammarly is an automated proofreader that corrects contextual spelling mistakes, checks for more than 250 grammar errors, enhances vocabulary usage, and suggests citations. While Microsoft Word has a grammar checker, it does not provide as extensive an analysis of your writing as Grammarly.

The program allows you to identify the writing it should analyze. For example, you can choose business letter, business email, report, memo, or website article in the business writing section. Grammarly will help identify multiple types of errors in your writing, including:

• Confused prepositions
• Overuse of the passive voice
• Wordy sentences
• Wrong use of word
• Contractions
• Plagiarism detection

After using this grammar checker on many articles, I found out I have a bad habit of ending sentences with prepositions. I’m also guilty of using the occasional squinting modifiers. Don’t remember what that is? Grammarly provides a help window to explain the issue in detail.

Yes, these are more refined points of grammar but knowing my bad habits helped me make my writing just a little bit better.

There are three ways you can use this editing platform:

1. Upload a document onto the Grammarly site to have it analyzed.
2. Install the Microsoft Word Grammarly plug-in to make editing changes right in your Microsoft Word document.
3. Install the Chrome browser extension so you can use the editing advice on any website. The Chrome extension is available at no cost.

I use options two and three.

Grammarly has a limited free version. A premium subscription costs $30 per month or $140 annually. I pay for the annual plan. On the Grammarly website, you have the option to send your work to a human proofreader for $.02 a word.

Grammarly does not replace the benefit of a human proofreader. But, I use it to “tune up” my writing.

How do you make sure what you publish is grammatically correct and without spelling errors?