4 best free grammar checkers you can use to level up your writing

Do you feel satisfied when you can express your thoughts, share your ideas or connect with others? That’s the power of good grammar. It’s when we learn the best structure to hold a language together.

Mastering it, however, doesn’t come easy. Even professional writers make mistakes. Lucky for us, the best free grammar checkers can help us improve the grammar in our essays and assignments. 

These tools have taken the world by storm. Every day, 30 million people and 50,000 teams around the globe rely on Grammarly’s real-time suggestions to improve their writing.

Why is grammar important for international students?

International students must prove their English proficiency — that is, how good they are with English — before they can join any university in an English-speaking country.

To prove this, they have to take a test. The English proficiency test IELTS focuses on four areas — Listening, Reading, Writing and Speaking — which are built on the foundation of grammar.

If you’ve passed it and are now in uni, congratulations! But it’s no time to slack off on grammar yet.

Making grammar mistakes over and over again not only harms you at uni, it can also ruin your job hunt. That’s why a grammar check is important so you avoid these pitfalls.

It also trains you to learn from your mistakes.

“Integrating grammar instruction into the revising and editing process helps students make immediate applications, thus allowing them to see the relevance of grammar to their own writing,” says Professor Beverly Ann Chin from the University of Montana. 

If you want to write clearly, bookmark these best free grammar checkers: 

Best free grammar checkers to level up your writing

Grammarly

With “grammar” in the name, it’s no secret that this is one of the best free grammar checkers online.

Grammarly flags grammar and spelling errors on a sidebar. It also lets you know when your punctuation is off or when you are writing in a passive voice. 

Apart from this, the tool also has a plagiarism checker, which allows you to check your article against billions of web pages for unoriginal text — an important tool to help you create A+ essays. 

You can download Grammarly as a browser extension, which is seamless and useful for new university students. 

Quillbot

Quillbot is more than a grammar checker. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), this free AI-based writing tool can check your grammar, rephrase sentences and summarise suggestions.

The result? A three-in-one tool that “learns as you check and correct.” Its user-friendly interface is simple and seamless, offering help without distracting you. Use it as a web-based tool or download Quillbot as a browser extension.

Hemingway Editor

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know,” says Ernest Hemingway.

To help writers achieve that, the Hemingway Editor highlights complex sentences in red, adverbs in blue, and passive voice in green. 

While the grammar checker doesn’t offer suggestions, it guides you to find your writing style. 

One writer prefers this virtual writing tool as it prevents him from getting distracted when writing within a web browser. 

ProWritingAid

If you’re looking for a fuss-free check, here’s where you can find it. ProWritingAid tells you if your content is hard to read by considering the variation in sentences and passive voices.

Can’t think of an alternative word? This grammar checker has a thesaurus function too.

Apart from this, you can find many educational tools such as articles, videos, and quizzes to improve your grammar.

Experienced writers have credited their writing success to ProWritingAid.

Siera London, a USA Today Best-Selling Author, says, “ProWritingAid has been a resource in my writer toolkit for many years. The program,e helps me to craft and clarify my stories for a better reader experience.”