Grammarly

As I said on another thread, I use Grammarly and find it helpful. It's not going make  your writing perfect but some of the suggestions have been useful. I use the free plugin on Chrome. I have not upgraded to the Premium version. I think it's worth it to give it a try and see what you think. You can always uninstall it.

If I had a nickel for every comma mistake it catches, I could pay for the darn things.  Just sayin.  I did look at a review site for grammar programs and there is one which is touted to be better with a lower price.  Can't remember the name but I will fine it.  Mike

I just gave editminion.com a try. I love it! It is purely non-judgmental and flags everything I though it should have. I haven't given it a really good test text, so as soon as I can devise a few paragraphs to hit it with, I'll report back on how well it did.

~Tom

I have a free membership with Grammarly through my college and I love it. I am actually in the process of doing another round of edits on my published books with it (because nothing is ever perfect). Grammarly isn't the be all end all, but it is really good. I would guess the article you linked to is old and that Grammarly has improved on its service since then. I ran the first 5 examples through and Grammarly caught all of the mistakes the article says it missed.

I've used editminion and liked it, but I now have a membership with autocrit and that one is really good for non-grammatical editing.

This may sound weird, but how about using a printed-on-paper, full-on Webster's Dictionary? I bought one years ago. It will always trump spell-check. For me, at least. Think about that alternative.

Just remember Spell check in the U.S. is different from the Queen's English. AND!!!! It often gives you the WRONG grammar. I don't know how many times it's underlined it's to tell me to make it its. But it's supposed to be the contraction. The program is only as good as the programmer. Dunecan has a point--Sometimes you want your grammar to be off for emphasis or some other reason. And there are totally free online dictionaries. I still have my unabridged big old hard cover dictionary, but it won't have any new words that the online one will have. The OED adds words every year. And just be sure to get proofreaders and/or an editor. We editors can make a world of difference!

You just can't depend on a computer program to fine-tune your  work. There isn't any program yet that can understand, evaluate and apply such a dynamic thing as language. It's like my friend in school who thought "quelle frommage" (said in jest) meant "too cheese," because the textbook, her only reference, told her "quelle dommage" meant "too bad."
That's why we're here, isn't it? To help each other get things right.
If you want to use English "improperly" to help define a character, it's perfectly all right. Great writers have done that for ages. I don't know where I learned this, but in my long-ago, nearly-forgotten youth I was told if you can speak the language, you can write it. Or maybe I made it up, to keep my students from freezing at the thought of writing.
Just say it, and write down what you said, and grammar be damned.  JP

here's the link to her blog. Grammar Girl
You can search for topics with the search feature at the top of the site.
I've always been a bit leery of the MS Word spelling and grammar check, and I was the same with Grammarly. I kept ignoring all of the "punctuation with two clauses" errors Grammarly was throwing at me. I finally went to Grammar Girl to double check and sure enough I was missing a whole bunch of commas. That said, when I went be to Grammarly, it did suggest a few unnecessary commas. Whatever system you have for checking spelling and grammar you have to put it into context and read the sentence again before making the change.

Well said JP, Mike