USING GRAMMARLY IN EDWARDS CLASSES V2.0 Presented by the Edwards School of Business Technology Support Centre TSC NEED MORE INFORMATION OR HELP? support@edwards.usask.ca
Table of Contents Introduction... 1 Getting started by setting up an account... 1 Grammarly: A First Look... 2 Uploading a Paper for Grammarly to check for errors... 2 Analyzing Grammarly Error Reports... 3 Fixing the problems and improving your paper... 4 Checking your paper for plagiarism... 6 Last steps: Running a Final Report and downloading a copy for submitting to your professor... 10 Getting Additional Help... 11
INTRODUCTION The Edwards School of Business has licensed Grammarly Premium for use by our students. Grammarly Premium will help students improve their overall writing performance by checking papers for over 250 types of grammatical errors. It also provides vocabulary enhancement suggestions, detects plagiarism, and provides citation suggestions to students. GETTING STARTED BY SETTING UP AN ACCOUNT Students who wish to use Grammarly will first need to set up an account. The account is free for Edwards students. Grammarly works best when using Chrome, Firefox or Safari, so it is likely a good idea to begin by opening one of these Internet browsers. After that, simply go to https://www.grammarly.com/edu/signup, you will either be taken directly to the signup page or you may have to press signup in the top right-hand corner. After signing up, the next time you visit Grammarly you will be able to go directly to the LOG IN or the GO TO EDITOR link. To create an account, you simply have to enter your name, your campus email address and then choose a password for the Grammarly website. To make things easier, use your PAWS password so you don t need to memorize a new one. Grammarly will then send an email to your PAWS email account. You will need to go to your email and VERIFY your subscription. After you have verified your subscription, log in with your email and password to access the program..presented by the Edwards School of Business Technology Support Centre 1
GRAMMARLY: A FIRST LOOK Grammarly is a very simple tool to use, but you may have a few questions the first time your visit the website. Luckily, Grammarly includes several Tutorial documents to help you if you are having trouble. However, the program is so easy to use that you will likely not have to search for help for too long. You can also check out the Apps area which will let you download Grammarly for Microsoft Office and your Internet Browser (such as Firefox, Safari or Chrome). UPLOADING A PAPER FOR GRAMMARLY TO CHECK FOR ERRORS Uploading your paper for Grammarly to check for errors is very simple. You can use one of two methods. The first method is to simply hit NEW which will allow you to copy and paste your document from Word into Grammarly for checking. The second method is to actually UPLOAD your entire Word file into Grammarly to check the document. The advantage of this method is you can make the change in Grammarly and then download the document back to Word when you are done. 1 2.Presented by the Edwards School of Business Technology Support Centre 2
For this manual, we will use the first method, and simply copy and paste our paper from Word into Grammarly directly. As an example, a document on Corporate Responsibility was downloaded from a Free Essay website that promised completely original papers in numerous business areas. However, the Free essay turned out not be actually free, and the paper that was downloaded ended up costing about $10 US. After downloading the paper to Word, the text was copied and then pasted into Grammarly for a first check through. ANALYZING GRAMMARLY ERROR REPORTS As soon as your paste your paper into Grammarly, the program will start to flag potential errors and highlight them for you in the right-hand side of the screen. In the example below, you can see some grammatical problems and spelling mistakes have already been flagged. Without fixing anything yet, you can see at the bottom of the screen that Grammarly has given your paper an overall score, and also counted how many critical and advanced issues your paper currently has. Sadly, our free paper has 41 critical issues and 67 advanced issues, yielding an overall score of 74. This means, of course, that our document needs some serious help..presented by the Edwards School of Business Technology Support Centre 3
If you actually click on the Score: 74 button, you will immediately get a summary report letting you know how your paper stacks up so far. The initial report can be viewed on the left. Your professor may get you to submit this report along with your paper when you hand it in for marking. Would you want to turn this paper in? There are several contextual spelling errors, many grammar problems, and even some basic punctuation issues. Before this paper is handed in, we should really see to fixing the problems. At least the program gives you some friendly encouragement! FIXING THE PROBLEMS AND IMPROVING YOUR PAPER At this point, you need to start going through the areas Grammarly has flagged for you to consider. For example, in this paper date was used in a sentence when dates should have been used instead. This problem is fairly obvious, but if you are confused by any error, you can use the Expand card feature by pressing the red down arrow..presented by the Edwards School of Business Technology Support Centre 4
After the error card has been expanded, Grammarly will explain why it has flagged the word or sentence in question. In this example, we have used an incorrect verb form with a singular subject. Grammarly then gives you a few examples of how the sentence could be reworded. In our case, it is as simple as changing Date to Dates to fix the problem. You shouldn t always blindly follow Grammarly s advice, however. You also have to use your own judgement. In the example below, the word Behaviour has been flagged. Grammarly is an American company, so the dictionary it utilizes is based on American English. Of course, in Canadian English, using behaviour is perfectly acceptable. So in this case, you could safely hit the Ignore option, and Grammarly will remove the flag from your report. Keep in mind, if you choose to ignore an error it will still be in your report - you have to check to make sure you are correct. When in doubt, ask someone!.presented by the Edwards School of Business Technology Support Centre 5
Go through as much as your paper as possible, fixing as many errors as you can. As you begin to fix the errors, your overall score Grammarly assigns to your paper will improve. In this example, after fixing six errors, the Grammarly score jumped from 74 to 77. The goal is to get your paper as close to 100% as you possibly can. One strategy that may help you tackle your editing is to turn off some of the different tools Grammarly uses to check your document. For example, there are 5 tools (spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure and style) that Grammarly employs to check your paper. You can turn each tool on or off with the slider button to the left of each tool. Clicking here also gives you a nice summary of how many of each type of errors you have left in the document to fix. CHECKING YOUR PAPER FOR PLAGIARISM The next step in proofing your paper is checking for potential plagiarism. Grammarly checks your paper against thousands of online papers, journals, newspapers and other sources. By default, this tool is turned off, and you have to turn in on. You can leave it on with the other Grammarly tools running as well, or turn the other tools off to solely concentrate on potential plagarism issues..presented by the Edwards School of Business Technology Support Centre 6
In this example, as soon as the plagiarism tool is turned on, you can see the score is at 91%. This is an extremely BAD score! It turns out the original paper we were promised when downloading this example, is 91% plagiarized from other sources. Sadly, our $10 US did not buy us a very original paper after all. In fact, if we re-run the Grammarly report that we completed earlier, you will see the dismal scores this paper has achieved. Not only is the paper not written very well, it also borrows text from a variety of other sources without referencing them..presented by the Edwards School of Business Technology Support Centre 7
As it turns out, this report heavily borrows material from another paper on a competing free essay website in the United Kingdom. This one section alone has 101 words that have been lifted verbatim from the other website. Most the time your problems will more likely stem from you forgetting to provide a source for some of your material. Grammarly has a great feature that shows you exactly how to include a citation in your paper in MLA, APA and Chicago citation styles. This provides an easy reminder and guide on how to properly cite your sources in your paper. In this next section, 190 words in the report appear to be directly copied from a Wikipedia article again without providing a citation source. If your professor runs your paper through Grammarly, these are the type of infractions they do NOT want to see from you!.presented by the Edwards School of Business Technology Support Centre 8
Finally, another 192 words in this paper have been directly copied from ANOTHER free, online essay website this time it is megaessays.com. Sadly, most of these services do not have original papers at all they are simply stealing the information from other sources and then trying to sell it to students. Save your money. However, Grammarly is not perfect sometimes it will flag words or sentences as plagiarism in your paper that have been written by you and are completely original. In this example, the phrase At the end of the day, any course has been flagged. This is where you need to use your judgement. The phrase At the end of the day has likely been used thousands of times in thousands of papers. It is a common expression, and you would NOT have to provide a source for this. This is an issue you can safely ignore by pressing the X. Your Professor, when going over the Grammarly report, will also notice issues like this and ignore them as well. As with anything though, if you are at all concerned with something, please check with your Professor for guidance..presented by the Edwards School of Business Technology Support Centre 9
LAST STEPS: RUNNING A FINAL REPORT AND DOWNLOADING A COPY FOR SUBMITTING TO YOUR PROFESSOR The online paper that was downloaded for this example has been very disappointing. It is fraught with errors and has heavily plagiarized its content from several sources. It is time to throw it out and start again from scratch! As you work on your paper, the Grammarly score will continue to increase as you address grammar and spelling problems. And, as you start to provide proper citations for material you have included from other sources, your plagiarism score will continually decrease. Your goal is to raise your overall score as close to 100% as you can, and decrease your plagiarism score as close to 0% as you can. You may not end up with a perfect score, but many of the few remaining problems you have, you will have used your own judgement to safely ignore. At this point, your can download a final, detailed report from Grammarly that you can keep or hand into your Professor when required. The report will download in PDF format which you can then save to your computer. If your Professor wants you to include this report when you hand in your paper, simply do that when the assignment is due..presented by the Edwards School of Business Technology Support Centre 10
The final report will look something like the example below. The fewer number of pages in your report the better! GETTING ADDITIONAL HELP If you need any additional assistance or have questions about using Grammarly, please contact the Edwards School of Business Technology Support Team and they would be happy to help you further! Our office is located in located in Room 143, or you can email us at support@edwards.usask.ca..presented by the Edwards School of Business Technology Support Centre 11