What are the best tools or strategies to check your grammar and spelling in an argumentative essay?

Online writing aids are powerful tools, but it's important to know their limitations. They often make mistakes when it comes to subject-verb agreement in complex sentences, and can often erase the unique timbre of your voice by recommending the most common syntax. Use online tools as a basic check, but never let them have the last word.

Reading out loud to yourself is particularly useful for sentence structure as well as grammar and spelling. You can identify areas that need work as you stumble over awkward phrasing or long sentences with no punctuation. This strategy offers even more help if you can give yourself some time between writing and reading over what you wrote. I prefer at least 24 hours, but even a few hours makes a difference. After a rest, you come back to your writing with fresh eyes and a fresh brain, allowing you to catch more mistakes and identify more areas for improvement.

Use the “read aloud” accessibility function (screen reader) built into your computer to help you hear whether it sounds natural & help spot problems.

Reading aloud is an incredibly powerful tool, especially if you try to read EXACTLY what's on the page. That is, pause at the end of every sentence and briefly at every comma. Read the text as if it's a speech you're giving and you'll likely find awkward grammar or punctuation errors. If you want a deep proofread for grammar, punctuation, and typos, read the whole essay backward one sentence at a time. This removes each sentence from the context of the larger essay and allows you to make each sentence as clean as it can be.

To save yourself some time, you can download templates for proofreading checklists to get yourself started, and add the items that are your common trip-ups.

Having Google Read/Write or another text-to-speech application read your work to you, is an excellent way to catch errors you might have missed. Consider using a ruler. Reading only the line on top of the ruler helps to focus what your eyes are seeing. If you’re reading for spelling only, you can start at the bottom right-hand corner and read each word (essentially backwards) until you reach the top left-hand corner of the page.