People who have just started preparing for the IELTS exam and do not like writing can have a hard time writing IELTS essays. The biggest problem I have observed with such students (even professionals) is the higher frequency of spelling and grammar mistakes.
By virtue of Bounded Rationality, we all tend to think that whatever we have done is all good but it is not always true. While getting feedback from teachers and peers is one of the best solutions but it not also not possible all the times. Therefore, I am sharing some tools that you can use to self-assess your writing. These tools will highlight the most common issues with your writing. Let’s get straight into the discussion of these tools and resources:
MS Word
While it sounds obvious thing but I don’t think everyone is utilising enough features of this amazing software that can help you improve your writing. Let’s understand how it can help you.
Spell and Grammar Checker – You can launch this feature pressing F7 key on your keyboard. Anything in your essay underlined in green is grammar issue and red underlined words represent spelling errors.
Word Count Checker – Many students tend to lose control over word count. Usually word counter is active in MS Word, but sometimes it may be disabled. Make sure you have activated it. It will help you knowing your average writing/typing speed, which is crucial from the time management perspective.
Grammarly
Grammarly is very popular nowadays as a spell and grammar checking program. It can help you fix the most obvious mistakes such as spelling/grammar and articles mistakes. These features are well-above standard MS Word features. The paid version offers even better facilities such as suggesting better word choices in the given context.
Ginger
Comparatively lesser effective than Grammarly, it is still a good program to check spelling and grammar mistakes.
There are tons of online spelling and grammar checkers. I have not checked them but I believe most of them should be good at the beginner stage.