By Roshni Mishra
Transcribed in July 2018 during the author's Modlingua internship, from Ravi Kumar's Modlingua Live session on using Grammarly together with the Modlingua Rubric - the second session in the series.
Source video: The ABSOLUTE BEST Way to Elevate Your Content Game with Grammarly Live - Modlingua Live
The Modlingua Rubric and AI Tools
Hi friends, I'm back. It's our second session. In our previous session, we had discussed the Modlingua Rubric and the 10-point agenda and learned how to improve our content writing and minimize errors. Those errors can be minor as well as major. A careful study based on the Rubric was recommended for all the content that you write, apart from manual intervention. Now we have many AI tools coming up that help us - grammar checkers, spell checkers, sentence checkers. Out of many options, I have chosen one, and that is Grammarly.
Today we are going to learn the usage of Grammarly in fine tune with the Modlingua Rubric. We will see how Grammarly can help us improve the control of errors as per the Modlingua Rubric, and at the same time decrease the time of proofreading and quality control and drastically improve delivery.
Installing Grammarly for Chrome
Let's start with today's demonstration. After we have installed Grammarly, I will browse you through certain aspects of how it checks text, and we'll see how things improve after using it. Go to Google and search for Grammarly. What we have to do is install Grammarly for Chrome. Click on the link, add the extension to Chrome, confirm - and now you see it has been installed in the right corner of the browser. Grammarly has been added to Chrome. The installation is automatic and simple, not at all complicated. After the installation is done you will see a green button - a round green shape with an arrow mark in the circle - and that is Grammarly.
Once it is installed, how do we use it? Generally, when you install Grammarly on Chrome it functions online only. For example, if you are writing a message or a mail through Gmail or any online activity, it will check your spelling online. It will not check your spelling in an MS Word file - for MS Word you have to install Grammarly for MS Word.
Free and Paid Versions
Grammarly has two options, paid and free. The paid option gives you more error-correction options, deeper options, while the free one can also be used to control errors like articles, punctuation, spaces, hyphens and commas - generally among the most important aspects of our content writing process, and ones that writers tend to overlook.
Even if you are using the free tool, you are of course free to add the paid version to your computer as well; it will be very helpful and worth doing. But let's start with the free version.
A Live Demonstration with an Intern Profile
To understand what others have done, I will come back to the admin panel of my computer and write one article here - you can do the same from your system. In our Modlingua Rubric we have referred to the profiles and career goals of all our interns, so let's say I want to check one of the intern profiles, and that is Karina. I will go to where I have saved all our interns' profiles and pick up Karina's profile, which we have discussed already, and copy-paste this text.
In our computers we also have spell checkers - MS Word gives you options, for example a red mark under "BA Hons. second year" or a word it does not recognize, and it recommends corrections. Many times the recommendations are wrong also, so you have to apply your wisdom.
Now I copy-paste Karina's profile and bring it back to my panel where I am planning to publish. The moment I have copy-pasted this text, Grammarly shows the mistakes: the article "the" before "second year in the French", a comma needed after "student", "an internship" instead of "a internship", "myself in the corporate world", a spacing mistake again in "the French", "the third prize", and several commas - after "yoga", after "water", and an additional comma wrongly added near "nutrition, Israel". So in a fraction of a second you are able to correct quite easily. Still, it recommends 23 more corrections - advanced issues.
Advanced Issues and Final Review
What are these 23 advanced issues? They can be related to sentence structure, they can be related to plagiarism - these are deeper issues. If you upgrade, you will be able to discover what the deeper problems are. From my point of view, after I have controlled the silly mistakes we just noticed, one can give a final reading and approve it all, and then save and publish.
Just imagine: you submit your content after a proper quality control at stage one, which you do manually, and at stage two you deploy Grammarly or any AI tool of your choice, do the corrections, and then bring the text back.
The Grammarly Online Editor
If for some reason you are not able to do corrections online, you can go to Grammarly's online editor. I was using my own online platform, but if you don't have one you can come here, upload the text, check it, then select all and copy - ctrl-a and ctrl-c - and bring the corrected version back to Karina's profile, do some formatting, and copy-paste it into the system where you have to submit your documents online. Isn't it very simple?
Combining Manual Quality Control with AI
Give it a try, my friend. You will be able to improve the quality of your work drastically and at the same time save your time, the editor's time, and the time of our own system. If we apply our quality control process developed through the Modlingua Rubric and combine it with artificial intelligence tools, you will be able to reduce the time gap in quality control by half at least.
With this, I would like to thank you all for your time. Please watch this video, and if you have liked it please share, subscribe and be part of our Community Learning Program. Hope to see you again in the next session, which I am planning on additional AI tools that will be useful for improving your content writing, translation and editing.
