I just thought I would post this in the hope it helps anyone out there who is making the same mistake I did.

Most people probably already know about Grammarly, the free proofing app/website. Personally, I had heard about it but never thought I needed to use it because I use MS Word. Oh, how wrong I was!

After recently discovering how much better it is at proofing, I was blown away (and pissed!). I'm only using the free version, but it picked up literally hundreds of typos and other errors that I missed, and which Word never highlighted!

I don't know why Word (which we pay an annual subscription for) can't do what Grammarly does, but I have spent the last 2 months editing all my stories, constantly copy & pasting back and forth from one place to another 100K characters (with spaces!) at at time because Grammarly has its limits, and re-uploading my individual chapters to RR and four other websites. It's been an absolute nightmare and I've burned through my whole backlog, but today I finally finished! Now I can get back to writing, and i'm more confident than ever about my work being online.

So, in short, save yourself a headache. Use Grammarly on each and every chapter as soon as its finished!

I started using it a month ago. I absolutely agree. After one day I went and paid for a year of it. Money well spent.

I'm looking at older chapters, and cringing as it the little circle pops up saying it has 107 suggestions for better grammar :( 
My early editing wasn't great.

The Wrote: I'm looking at older chapters, and cringing as it the little circle pops up saying it has 107 suggestions for better grammar :( 
My early editing wasn't great.

IKR! I proofed my stories so many times and trusted that Word would catch the obvious mistakes I missed. Cut to me picking my jaw up off the floor when the 100+ suggestions pops up on every single chapter lol. Such a relief to know that future chapters will only ever need one edit. 

I'm sticking with the free version because I don't want to start second guessing my style and risk losing the personality of my writing. Of course, I'll no doubt regret this at some point in the future as well... Do you find the paid features useful?

I agree wholeheartedly! 

The spell-check in MS Word is... excrement, to say it diplomatically. It autocorrects stuff it should not, does nothing with certain typos, highlights other stuff that is not wrong. 
Or just stops working for no obvious reason at all. 
For commas and such it is completely useless.

Do not trust the spell-check in MS Word! 

It is - maybe - good for a base-level proofing, but for anything you wish to publish, it is simply not enough! (Learned it myself...)

I think, even Grammarly isn't enough for professional publishing, but anyone putting their fic up on RR, running the stuff through G should be a must.

Does anyone know, if there is such a program for German, perchance?

For professional publishing I'd endorse an actual proofreader if possible (I know not everyone has that kind of cash.) No AI software is going to understand nuance, character or even your tone of writing. They can both be fallible in one way or another of course, but I'd say don't lean on it as your exclusive tool for editing because it's not perfect. Use it for suggestions because it's useful and it will catch things other applications won't, it's built to do that, but it can only roboticly spout out rules that aren't always carved in stone for every writer. For your 3rd person narration? Sure. For your character dialog? Skip. Not everyone speaks in a perfect grammatical manner.

I've recently started using it and I have to say it's the best!

I recommend it as well 

BigDream Wrote: grammarly is a keystroke logger program that record severything you write on your computer with it installed.

there are other programs that do what it does withou tit recording every keystroke.

This was a fear of mine, but the thing is it's using the internet to contact the home server to check the data your input for grammar mistakes. as opposed to other programs that keep everything contained. Think of it this way if it used that data for any nefarious purpose someone would have picked up on it, the end-user agreement would be enough to destroy the company if say they trying to steal your manuscript, at worst they use it to make you feel back about your common errors. I will say the app is an extreme annoyance if you let it run outside of the editing window. It will constantly want to critique anything you type from comments in the forums here to youtube and facebook (which could be considered even worse keyloggers), but I just deactivate it when I'm not actively using it.

But I do agree that there are many other programs that people can use besides this one and I'd say search around before automatically going with this one. It's better than not having one, but only slightly (shakes fist in Gramarly's general direction.)