Making your texts public in any way – from sending a letter to submitting an essay or article for publication – forces you to make sure that both the contents and the language meet the highest standards. 1Checker is a free tool that double-checks that no spelling, grammar, or any other English-related mistakes lower the quality of your writings.
Unlike MS Word’s spell checker is but a text-editing tool that mainly checks the spelling of a word in isolation, 1Checker describes itself as a “writing enhancement tool” that not only looks for spelling errors, but also grammar and style inconsistencies based, among other things, on the context the word or expression is used in. Besides, it’ll offer you vocabulary- and dictionary-based alternatives, as well as automatic translation services via Google Translate. The program makes use of state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies not only to proofread your texts, but also to help you enhance them in the most natural and effective way.
The first thing you’re asked to do is to register with 1Checker. Registration is free, and all you are required to do is provide an e-mail and a password of your choice. Once you’ve signed up and logged in to the app, you can copy and paste any text onto the program’s interface or retrieve it from a local document. The app will analyze your text in no time and will present you with a clear report stating all the spelling, grammar, and other mistakes found (expressed both in number of occurrences and percentage); marks for the text’s vocabulary, structure, and CEFR vocabulary level; a count of the words and sentences that make up the text, and the total number of suggestions given to enhance the quality of the text. Close the report to go back to your text and start working on it.
Your text now includes all the alleged mistakes using a simple color code – red for all grammar and spelling mistakes, and cyan for suggestions. Grammar mistakes may include misuse of articles, use of singular and plural nouns, incorrect use of prepositions, capitalization errors, confused words, subject-verb agreement issues, incorrect use of pronouns, use of the wrong tense, or an incorrect adjective order. Suggestions, however, refer to correct instances that still offer some room for improvement in terms of vocabulary. You will be offered an alternative word or expression that in most cases does help to enhance the overall quality of the text.
You can simply accept all the proposed corrections and apply them all to your text with one click, or check them individually. Whenever you select a mistake, you’ll be presented with an explanation of the change proposed, which will help you improve your use of English and to avoid making the same mistake again in the future. Besides, the program’s interface includes a small box that you can use either to enter a search term or to type in a word or a short text that needs translating. 1Checker will detect the language of the source text and will translate it into English using Google Translate.
1Check is completely free to use, and though it is limited to texts below 10,000 words there is no limit in the number of texts or files you can check with it. Though Google Translate and all automatic spell and grammar checking algorithms have, by definition, limitations of their own, no standard spell checker will ever come close to the level of excellence that this writing enhancement tool provides.
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