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Grammar

17 Online Grammar Editing Best Practices for Freelance Writers

These 17 best practices and tips will help you proofread and polish your freelance writing to ensure it’s client-ready.

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Trusted By Industry Leaders

Introduction

Our text compare tool is a fantastic, lightweight tool that provides plagiarism checks between two documents. Whether you are a student, blogger or publisher, this tool offers a great solution to detect and compare similarities between any two pieces of text. In this article, I will discuss the different ways to use the tool, the primary features of the tool and who this tool is for. There is an FAQ at the bottom if you run into any issues when trying to use the tool.

What makes Originality.ai’s text comparison tool stand out?

Keyword density helper – This tool comes with a built-in keyword density helper in some ways similar to the likes of SurferSEO or MarketMuse the difference being, ours is free! This feature shows the user the frequency of single or two word keywords in a document, meaning you can easily compare an article you have written against a competitor to see the major differences in keyword densities. This is especially useful for SEO’s who are looking to optimize their blog content for search engines and improve the blog’s visibility.

Ways to compare

File compare – Text comparison between files is a breeze with our tool. Simply select the files you would like to compare, hit “Upload” and our tool will automatically insert the content into the text area, then simply hit “Compare” and let our tool show you where the differences in the text are. By uploading a file, you can still check the keyword density in your content.

URL compare

Comparing text between URLs is effortless with our tool. Simply paste the URL you would like to get the content from (in our example we use a fantastic blog post by Sherice Jacob found here) hit “Submit URL” and our tool will automatically retrieve the contents of the page and paste it into the text area, then simply click “Compare” and let our tool highlight the difference between the URLs. This feature is especially useful for checking keyword density between pages!

Simple text compare

You can also easily compare text by copying and pasting it into each field, as demonstrated below.

Features of Originality.ai’s Text Compare Tool

Ease of use

Our text compare tool is created with the user in mind, it is designed to be accessible to everyone. Our tool allows users to upload files or enter a URL to extract text, this along with the lightweight design ensures a seamless experience. The interface is simple and straightforward, making it easy for users to compare text and detect the diff.

Multiple text file format support

Our tool provides support for a variety of different text files and microsoft word formats including pdf file, .docx, .odt, .doc, and .txt, giving users the ability to compare text from different sources with ease. This makes it a great solution for students, bloggers, and publishers who are looking for file comparison in different formats.

Protects intellectual property

Our text comparison tool helps you protect your intellectual property and helps prevent plagiarism. This tool provides an accurate comparison of texts, making it easy to ensure that your work is original and not copied from other sources. Our tool is a valuable resource for anyone looking to maintain the originality of their content.

User Data Privacy

Our text compare tool is secure and protects user data privacy. No data is ever saved to the tool, the users’ text is only scanned and pasted into the tool’s text area. This makes certain that users can use our tool with confidence, knowing their data is safe and secure.

Compatibility

Our text comparison tool is designed to work seamlessly across all size devices, ensuring maximum compatibility no matter your screen size. Whether you are using a large desktop monitor, a small laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, this tool adjusts to your screen size. This means that users can compare texts and detect the diff anywhere without the need for specialized hardware or software. This level of accessibility makes it an ideal solution for students or bloggers who value the originality of their work and need to compare text online anywhere at any time.

As a freelance writer, you need your writing to be professional and polished to reflect the care and quality you put into your work. 

Poor grammar detracts from even the most stellar content. To ensure your freelance writing is at its best before you share it with clients, follow these best practices for grammar editing. 

Make editing a breeze and catch common spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors with the Originality.ai Grammar Checker.

Key Takeaways (TL;DR)

  1. Take a break between writing and editing
  2. Edit for content before correcting grammar
  3. Proofread for one kind of grammar error at a time
  4. Make yourself a checklist
  5. Have your style guide handy
  6. Read your writing aloud
  7. Amend spelling errors
  8. Check for proper punctuation
  9. Follow capitalization rules
  10. Review subject-verb agreement
  11. Look for consistent verb tenses
  12. Check for incomplete thoughts or sentence fragments
  13. Proofread for sentence modifiers
  14. Switch up the order you read the article in
  15. Optionally print the article to review in a different format
  16. Use a grammar checker
  17. Have an editor or friend do a final proofread

1. Take a Break Between Writing and Editing

If time allows, build a break into your timeline between the writing and editing phases. Do something completely different or work on an unrelated assignment. 

It helps to create some distance between the work you put into the writing and the work you are about to put into grammar editing. Return to the work with a fresh perspective to help any errors and inconsistencies jump out at you. 

2. Edit for Content Before You Edit for Grammar

Make sure your content is in its final form before you dig into grammar edits. If you are at a point where you are still rearranging, adding copy or reviewing the substance of the piece, wait until the content editing steps are complete before editing for grammar. 

This helps you save time and prevents the need for duplicating efforts such as performing grammar edits all over again after you’ve come up with a final draft. 

3. Proofread for One Type of Grammar Error at a Time

Breaking up your editing process into phases helps to ensure you’ve checked for all aspects of grammar. For each read-through, isolate one facet of grammar and check the entire document for related mistakes. 

4. Make Yourself a Checklist

There are a lot of aspects of grammar to check for when editing. To avoid overlooking one of them and to help keep you organized, use a checklist to track each facet of grammar you are checking for. 

Whether you make your own or download one online, keep it as a working document and continue to update it. The more written work you edit, the more common errors you will discover. Add them to your list.

5. Have Your Style Guide Handy

Whether it’s a house style guide or a standard editorial style guide, have it on hand so you can refer to it when you have a grammar-related question. Your style guide dictates rules for spelling, punctuation, numbering, and other grammar-adjacent rules. 

6. Read Your Writing Aloud 

When you are ready to start editing for grammar, read your writing out loud. Speaking slows down your reading and allows you to hear each word. Being close to a piece of writing can cause your eyes to overlook errors, especially when self-editing. Hearing the words aloud gives you a view of your work that is more like a reader’s and less like a writer’s.

7. Tackle Spelling Errors 

Correct spelling errors immediately. Use available grammar and spelling tools to help double-check your work, such as editing and spell-checking apps. These tools can provide very helpful backup for discovering hard-to-spot misspellings. 

8. Peruse for Punctuation Edits

On your first read-through, look for missing punctuation and over-punctuation. In particular, check for missing end punctuation, comma splices and run-on sentences. When reading aloud, if you find yourself struggling to get through a long sentence, break it up into separate sentences. This helps with readability as well as grammar.

9. Follow Capitalization Rules

Look for missing capitalization as well as incorrect capitalization. Generally, capital letters are reserved for the beginning of sentences and proper nouns. It’s a common error to capitalize words that seem important. If you find a capitalization error, search the document to find and correct additional instances. 

10. Review Subject-Verb Agreement

Review your document to ensure that singular subjects are paired with singular forms of verbs. Plural nouns should be paired with plural verbs. When performing this search, read aloud again. Your ear will usually pick up subject-verb disagreement right away. 

11. Look for Consistent Verb Tense

Your content should have a consistent verb tense throughout the piece. 

Then, also remember to check for passive voice, which tends to be wordier and more challenging to understand. Active voice is usually more concise and clear. 

Example:

  • Active: “We created the perfect app for your active lifestyle.
  • Passive: “The perfect app for your active lifestyle was created by us.

12. Check for Incomplete Thoughts

Incomplete thoughts equal fragments, not sentences. Fix any sentence fragments by turning them into complete sentences with a subject, verb, and complete thought. Sometimes, fragments can be used creatively for emphasis. If it is mindfully done and it works, go for it. If it’s awkward and feels like something is missing, fix it.

13. Mind Your Modifiers

A misplaced or dangling sentence modifier can stop a reader in their tracks and confuse your message. As you read through your work, make sure the words or phrases used to describe a noun appear in the right place. Sometimes, this requires a little rewriting to achieve clarity.

Examples:

  • Misplaced modifier: The girl was walking her dog on her phone.
    • The girl walking the dog was on her phone.
  • Dangling modifier: Steaming from the kettle, the man poured the water for tea.
    • The kettle was steaming, so the man poured the water for tea. 

14. Read the Content in a Different Order

Changing the order in which you read the content can help you catch grammatical errors you missed the first time around. If you start at the last page and read toward the first, you force yourself to have a new perspective. 

15. Consider Printing the Pages

If you’ve been writing and editing on a backlit screen for hours, it can help to print out your work and change your environment. Whether you sit in a cafe, move to a different room, or print out an article, it can be a refreshing way to change your perspective. 

16. Use a Grammar Checker

Especially when self-editing, a grammar tool can quickly pick up on those grammar-related typos that are so easy to miss when you are close to a piece of writing. 

17. Have an Editor or Friend do a Final Proofread

Once you’ve been through your writing back and forth and have every aspect of the grammar edit checked off your list, it’s time to get a fresh set of eyes on the final draft. Someone unconnected to the writing may find things you missed. 

Final Thoughts

Grammar editing is time well spent. After all the time and effort you put into researching and writing, perfecting grammar is necessary to deliver professional-level content to your clients. 

Streamline your editorial process with Originality.ai’s patented toolkit including a Grammar Checker, Readability Checker, AI Checker, Predictive SEO Tool, and Plagiarism Checker.

Then, discover more grammar and editing tips in our guides:

Melissa Fanella

Melissa Fanella is a writer, editor, and marketing professional with over 15 years of experience in content and messaging for businesses and nonprofits. Her expertise is in crafting authentic, people-first content that is compelling and engaging for audiences and positioned for business goals.

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Why is the English so poor for some prompts?

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In The Press

Originality.ai has been featured for its accurate ability to detect GPT-3, Chat GPT and GPT-4 generated content. See some of the coverage below…

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Originality.ai did a fantastic job on all three prompts, precisely detecting them as AI-written. Additionally, after I checked with actual human-written textual content, it did determine it as 100% human-generated, which is important.

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Jon Gillham, Founder of Originality.ai came up with a tool to detect whether the content is written by humans or AI tools. It’s built on such technology that can specifically detect content by ChatGPT-3 — by giving you a spam score of 0-100, with an accuracy of 94%.

Felix Rose-Collins

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ChatGPT lacks empathy and originality. It’s also recognized as AI-generated content most of the time by plagiarism and AI detectors like Originality.ai

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For web publishers, Originality.ai will enable you to scan your content seamlessly, see who has checked it previously, and detect if an AI-powered tool was implored.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why is it important to check for plagiarism?

Tools for conducting a plagiarism check between two documents online are important as it helps to ensure the originality and authenticity of written work. Plagiarism undermines the value of professional and educational institutions, as well as the integrity of the authors who write articles. By checking for plagiarism, you can ensure the work that you produce is original or properly attributed to the original author. This helps prevent the distribution of copied and misrepresented information.

What is Text Comparison?

Text comparison is the process of taking two or more pieces of text and comparing them to see if there are any similarities, differences and/or plagiarism. The objective of a text comparison is to see if one of the texts has been copied or paraphrased from another text. This text compare tool for plagiarism check between two documents has been built to help you streamline that process by finding the discrepancies with ease.

How do Text Comparison Tools Work?

Text comparison tools work by analyzing and comparing the contents of two or more text documents to find similarities and differences between them. This is typically done by breaking the texts down into smaller units such as sentences or phrases, and then calculating a similarity score based on the number of identical or nearly identical units. The comparison may be based on the exact wording of the text, or it may take into account synonyms and other variations in language. The results of the comparison are usually presented in the form of a report or visual representation, highlighting the similarities and differences between the texts.

String comparison is a fundamental operation in text comparison tools that involves comparing two sequences of characters to determine if they are identical or not. This comparison can be done at the character level or at a higher level, such as the word or sentence level.

The most basic form of string comparison is the equality test, where the two strings are compared character by character and a Boolean result indicating whether they are equal or not is returned. More sophisticated string comparison algorithms use heuristics and statistical models to determine the similarity between two strings, even if they are not exactly the same. These algorithms often use techniques such as edit distance, which measures the minimum number of operations (such as insertions, deletions, and substitutions) required to transform one string into another.

Another common technique for string comparison is n-gram analysis, where the strings are divided into overlapping sequences of characters (n-grams) and the frequency of each n-gram is compared between the two strings. This allows for a more nuanced comparison that takes into account partial similarities, rather than just exact matches.

String comparison is a crucial component of text comparison tools, as it forms the basis for determining the similarities and differences between texts. The results of the string comparison can then be used to generate a report or visual representation of the similarities and differences between the texts.

What is Syntax Highlighting?

Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) that helps to visually distinguish different elements of a code or markup language. It does this by coloring different elements of the code, such as keywords, variables, functions, and operators, based on a predefined set of rules.

The purpose of syntax highlighting is to make the code easier to read and understand, by drawing attention to the different elements and their structure. For example, keywords may be colored in a different hue to emphasize their importance, while comments or strings may be colored differently to distinguish them from the code itself. This helps to make the code more readable, reducing the cognitive load of the reader and making it easier to identify potential syntax errors.

How Can I Conduct a Plagiarism Check between Two Documents Online?

With our tool it’s easy, just enter or upload some text, click on the button “Compare text” and the tool will automatically display the diff between the two texts.

What Are the Benefits of Using a Text Compare Tool?

Using text comparison tools is much easier, more efficient, and more reliable than proofreading a piece of text by hand. Eliminate the risk of human error by using a tool to detect and display the text difference within seconds.

What Files Can You Inspect with This Text Compare Tool?

We have support for the file extensions .pdf, .docx, .odt, .doc and .txt. You can also enter your text or copy and paste text to compare.

Will My Data Be Shared?

There is never any data saved by the tool, when you hit “Upload” we are just scanning the text and pasting it into our text area so with our text compare tool, no data ever enters our servers.

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