As the world becomes a global village, the importance of using a common language to communicate with other people around the world becomes more pronounced. Whether you want to send an email to a specific customer or your employer or post a blog, you have to make sure your writing is error-free, clear, and accurate.
Appropriate written content will help you look more professional and attract your target audiences. However, not all people are good at English writing since it’s not their mother tongue. So, writing for them would be somehow challenging and time-consuming. Fortunately, the digital world makes writing a text easier for non-English users. They can use different online tools to do this, and in this article, we will discuss whether “Can online spell checkers like Grammarly substitute the editors” or not?
Benefits of using online spell-checking tools
As we discussed earlier, everyone who wants to write English content can find different online tools using which they can improve their writing. Some of the most prominent tools include Grammarly, ProWrittingAid, WhiteSmoke, and Ginger. Such tools can help users relieve grammar mistakes and correct their writing spelling and punctuation.
As a content writer, sometimes I use these online tools to level up my content language, and they also have beneficial options. For instance, in Grammarly, you have several options to enhance your word choice, tone, and clarity by suggesting synonyms and definitions. Other options include the formality level and the domain, i.e., business, email, casual, academic, etc.
So, if you want to write an article regarding “the effect of nutrition on overall health” and your target audience is elderly people, you can choose the public domain and general audiences and set the formality level on informal or neutral. These options will be altered as follow if your target audiences are experts: domain: academic, audiences: knowledgeable or experts, and formal.
No doubt, such a wide range of options will help you write good content. These tools also do proofread and get rid of common editing mistakes as far as they can. Additionally, one beneficial aspect of these tools is that they are always available for writers; some are free, making them popular software.
What are professional human editors?
Professional editors like DoNotEdit editor team review content and provide you feedback using which you can level up your writing from structure, tone, consistency, etc. aspects. Such people work in different fields and are highly specialized in it, so they can suggest valuable points and intelligent suggestions to make your writing perfect. However, contrary to the tools mentioned earlier, professional human editors are not always available, and their service charges a high fee. But considering these limitations, such editors can’t be substituted for online tools, and I’ll explain in detail in the next section.
Professional editors V.s online spell-checking tools
However, based on my experiences, although these tools do their job well as spell checkers, they are beneficial as far as your text is not highly professional and expert. To be more precise, as far as I tested, these tools are not perfect, and sometimes they cannot find all errors.
In addition, since they are not human and work based on artificial intelligence tools, they cannot correctly understand the context and tone of your writing, especially when the article is written in a highly specialized field.
I remember when I tried to write my thesis, which was related to “using nanoparticles for drug delivery.” When I wrote the introduction section and used Grammarly to correct my mistakes, it marked words like “oleyl-chitosan” or “homocamptothecin” as misspelled.
At the same time, they were specific terms of drugs and materials used in the drug delivery field. They may also suggest proper synonyms for your context. Sometimes, online spell-checker tools can’t differentiate specific words used in professional-specific areas.
On the contrary, editors usually are highly expert in specific in their working fields. This means that, for example, academic editors are familiar with particular words which are frequently used in scientific articles and dissertations in their field of study. In contrast, copywriter editors are more familiar with special terms and expressions in the business and marketing world (e.g., lead, sales funnel, marketing funnel, etc.). On the other hand, although online spell-checker tools can significantly help writers, they cannot replace the expertise and judgment of professional editors.
These explanations, as mentioned earlier, are the most prominent reasons why online spell checkers are not yet a substitute for human editors. Based on my opinion, both online spell-checkers and human editors can be somehow complementary, and you can benefit from the prose of both depending on your context and goal.
Based on my experience, using online tools to check your text to relieve basic errors initially will be better. But note that you should never accept all online spell-checker suggestions; you should carefully review them and accept those you think are appropriate. For example, the online tool may suggest you replace the word “significantly” with other synonyms like “substantially.” But you know the first one represents that the statistical analysis has been done on your data, while the latter one doesn’t show such a concept. In the next step, you can benefit from professional editors to humanize your content, add particular words frequently used in that field, and relieve the probable remaining errors and mistakes.
Final words
This article introduces two essential options for writing and editing articles: online spell checkers and human editors. We explain the pros and cons of both options and compare both to show if it is possible to substitute online spell checkers with editors. Based on my experience and review of other writers’ opinions, I have come to the conclusion that these are not substitutable. To have perfect content targeting the right audiences, we can benefit from the advantages of both these options. Firstly, review the text using online tools and correct the basic errors, then get the help of professional experience editors who are experts in our needed field.