Harper is a free English grammar checker designed to be just right. You can think of it as an open-source alternative to Grammarly. I created it after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition.

Harper is completely private, in every sense of the word.

Since Harper runs on-device, your data doesn't go anywhere you don't want it to.

That means you have 100% certainty we don't violate your copyright by training large language models.

me: oh sure, why not. doesn't really make a difference either way.

[click]

There was an ask about Grammarly and if paying for it would worth it. A lot of answers came from the community and I want to thank everyone for their advice!

I compiled the last answers I got about it here. (all were anons)

also, 13yo anon again, Granmarly Paid isn’t worth it at all. It’s still going beta in Google Docs and doesn’t work properly sometimes without even paying for premium. i’d suggest going to Pro Writing Aid or Hemmingway. They’re really helpful for fiction writers as well as something normal. hope this helps! xx

I use Grammarly on my computer for essays and got it on my phone and it’s the most annoying thing ever, it autocorrects at the last second as I send the text. It’s not the best for creative writing like people have been saying, but I definitely don’t recommend it on the phone :/

When having grammarly assess your writing, you can specify what kind of writing your doing with the 'intent' option. You can specify if you're doing creative writing or other forms of writing and it'll adjust it's corrections accordingly. Grammarly will instruct you to be straight and to the point (fewer adverbs, shorter sentences) if you're doing technical writing. It won't do that if you specify creative writing

Grammarly is fantastic for essay writing and university papers, but for that you need the premium version. Within creative writing, grammarly is good for spelling and grammar mistakes and it’s helped me a lot in that regard! Don’t get premium if you’re not using it for academic papers, because it’s expensive and not worth it

In conclusion, it seems like it’s great for schoolwork, like essays and professional writing that you want be checked for errors. It doesn’t seem to be useful for creative writing. Thanks again to everyone!

I went off in our writers group today about Microsoft Word’s extremely broken grammar checker. 😂 I had to do some reformatting to share a WIP to Google Drive, so I’d copied it into Word, and those little blue squiggles started appearing -- with some ridiculous suggestions. (I didn’t copy them all, because I didn’t want to sandbag the chat, but there were lots of strange ones.) This sort of nonsense is why I don’t ever write in Word.

I literally used a comma which it told me to get rid of, and after I got rid of it, it told me it needed a comma in the same place. That red line was laughing at me.

i admit i still make mistakes with punctuations... but aside from that, i'm proud to say i'm kinda good!! years of journalism helped me :D