Grammar Checker
Light pass on student essay drafts: agreement, tense, punctuation. Not Grammarly's full surface area, just the things students most often miss when writing under deadline.
How to use this
Paste a paragraph or a whole draft after you have finished the argument, not before. The checker looks for the mechanical errors students most often make under deadline: subject and verb disagreeing across a long noun phrase, tense sliding between past and present within a paragraph, comma splices, missing apostrophes in possessives, quotation marks and full stops in the wrong order, a pronoun with no clear antecedent. Each flag names the rule and shows the sentence so you can see the problem in context.
Fix them one at a time, by hand, reading the whole sentence rather than only the underlined word. Tense is the one to take most seriously in a literature essay: the convention is to describe what happens in a text in the present tense (Chopin sets the story during a storm) and to reserve the past for events in the author's life or in history. A draft that drifts between the two reads as careless even when the argument is good.
Run it again after the fixes, because a correction in one clause sometimes breaks agreement in the next. Then read the draft aloud once; the checker will not catch a sentence that is grammatical but unclear, and your ear will. The widget on this page is a preview: until the full version ships, the result panel shows a worked example of the flags rather than a check of your text.
Important caveats
This is a light pass, deliberately. It does not rewrite sentences, suggest synonyms, score your tone or judge your argument, and it is not a replacement for a full-featured editor. It checks a short list of high-frequency errors and leaves your style alone. Accepting every suggestion from a heavier tool tends to sand a student's voice into something generic; the aim here is a clean draft that still sounds like you.
Some flags will be wrong. Literary quotation breaks rules on purpose, dialect in a quoted line is not an error, and a deliberate fragment can be the best sentence in the paragraph. When a flag lands inside a quotation, leave the quotation exactly as the author wrote it. When it lands on your own sentence and you disagree, you are allowed to be right; the rule and the example are there so you can decide.
Correcting grammar is not cheating and no teacher thinks it is; is Grammarly cheating? sets out where the line sits. The line is composition: a tool that fixes an apostrophe is proofreading, a tool that writes the paragraph is not. Keep this one on the proofreading side and you have nothing to disclose.