Grammarly in San Francisco provides its grammar improvement and AI driven writing assistance platform, available on free or paid premium and business plans.
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VisibleThread VT Docs
Score 10.0 out of 10
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VisibleThread provides language audit software that performs document content analysis to bid and proposal managers and government agencies. They have formed a partnership with Privia for the more standard proposal automation capabilities.
Grammarly is a step ahead of the traditional spelling and grammar checking tool that is in-built with Microsoft Word. There are scenarios when you have to write long-form content, and depending on your normal day-to-day way of speech, you tend to write content using the same tone and sentence constructs. There may be nothing "wrong" as such, but Grammarly points out those small glitches in your text, which you considered to be correct but is not really correct. One such area is the usage of "passive voice" in the sentences that I used to write. I find Grammarly really helpful here.
VT is fabulous to proposal writing as it created for that. It can also be used for ANY type of persuasive or technical writing. If you can write it, VT can help to make the writing better. BUT!!! if you are writing news articles or descriptive writing, this is NOT the software for you. VT works to eliminate fluff, ambiguous words, exaggerations, run-on sentences, improper grammar, misspelled words, sentence fragments, etc. VT also works to eliminate passive writing. As with any software, use it for what it was created - and find something else for the rest.
Integration with existing tools - Grammarly works in practically all text areas across your browser, including email and things like Google Docs, etc.
Quality control - the meat of Grammarly is checking your text and writing in real-time, directly as you type. Most of the time, Grammarly provides very accurate recommendations and quality checks on your text.
Analytics and reporting - Grammarly sends regular updates via email about your usage statistics and other detailed info. This type of reporting can be very helpful in tracking your progress over time.
Acronym finder - the best acronym finder I have used! This creates an Excel spreadsheet with the acronyms and their definitions in an alphabetically sorted worksheet ... AND this worksheet includes actual sentences from the document showing how and where the acronym was used.
Compare documents - WOW! what a wonderful update! You get an Excel worksheet with the 2 compared documents side-by-side showing differences in red and statements with no changes in blue.
Starter compliance matrix (SCM) - again, one of the best SCM-creators I have used. This choice is quick, concise, and the resulting Excel worksheet is easy to manipulate and change.
Dictionaries - I would like to see more "canned" dictionaries. We create our own, but I know that VT has more that they can supply, giving us more quick turnaround changes (versus always having to start from scratch).
I have not really used customer support. I used the FAQ page to see how to re-install Grammarly because it wasn't functioning properly in longer documents. It seems to be working better now, but it still does not always underline all of the issues in the actual text. Thus, it is sometimes difficult to know where the errors are located.
I have not used anything like Grammarly before and that is probably why I love it so much. It works very well for what I need. Plus, it goes above and beyond. I don't need it all the time but it is great to use in any communication occasion. I love it
We reviewed many other products but found all of them did not have the extent of tasks that VT had. These searches were over 5 years ago and many of the products reviewed are no longer available. In addition, some software still in existence have merit, just not to the extent we need. I do not want to give anyone a bad rating just because we did not choose them. Again, choose the right software for the right job!
We reduced proposal writing time and output. By reducing time, we gained time for work in other areas of proposal handling. I used to need 3-5 DAYS to create an acronym list. Now, with VT, I do the same work in 1-2 hours!
VT is for proposal WRITING and not for proposal HANDLING. Our proposal managers and coordinators do the handling part.
