Dear Gunnar and Derek,
Derek Lomas wrote: “A friend of mine works at Turnitin. He is developing the AI-assistant that offers students recommendations as they submit drafts, prior to turning it in to a human.”
Gunnar Swanson wrote: "A good exchange with a human editor may be preferable but having a machine help someone analyze writing should only help someone’s development as a writer.”
This is not about selling essays or using Turnitin, but rather about a useful copy editing tool for individual users with a plagiarism detector built in. This is Grammarly. Grammarly comes in two versions. One is free. The other is a premium version for paying subscribers. I’m posting this as much for working scholars and scientists as for PhD students or the students whom we teach and advise.
The premium version of Grammarly is quite helpful for identifying writing problems. It does not write or even rewrite for an author, but it flags problems and in many cases makes useful suggestions. Because it keeps track of problem issues with a score, it is a useful copy editing tool. Writers can simply keep reworking the text to remove problems. For serious work, this requires some expertise — one situation is that Grammarly occasionally flags problems that are judgment calls in scholarly writing. For example, it cannot distinguish between ere repetition and the necessary repetition of technical terms.
Grammarly Premium also has a built-in plagiarism checker. The free version does less. Premium is far more helpful, and the price is quite reasonable for anyone whose job requires writing. Many journalists now use the tool, as do copy editors and proof readers. I sometimes use Grammarly as well — it doesn’t write for me, but it helps me to flag and correct problems; it is a useful tool when copy editing text that others write.
https://www.grammarly.com
While Grammarly permits users to import entire documents, I find it more helpful to work at the paragraph level or with blocks of several paragraphs. I copy and paste into Grammarly, then I copy and paste from Grammarly to MS Word.
Working with a skilled copy editor is a powerful and useful experience. Few among us can afford a copy editor. Grammarly is a reasonable tool. A full year subscription costs $140.00 US on an annual subscription plan. This compares very favorably with the cost of a copy editor.
Grammarly is especially helpful for that large group of people who write in English as a second or third language.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Tongji University in Cooperation with Elsevier | URL: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation/
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
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