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My good friend Vinny introduced me to After the Deadline, a nifty WordPress and Firefox plugin that promises to “help you write better by adding spell, style, and grammar checking to web applications.”

As some of you know I have been on a writing rampage these last few weeks, and as in everything that I ever do, I try my best to write concise, clear and well written articles. For someone who didn’t start learning (i.e. reading, writing and speaking) the American English language until I was 17 years old, I feel that I’ve done a decent job here on my blog, but one can never be too careful.

The list of features that provided out of the box is quite impressive:

• Spell checking that uses artificial intelligence to make recommendations based on the context;
• Detection of common misused words, for those times when your brain gets ahead of you and you type one word, when you really meant another;
• Style checker to help you simplify complex phrases, avoid redundancy, passive voice, clichés and bias language;
• Extensive grammar checker;

and all of these will also be explained to you, so that you not only fix your mistakes, but learn from them too!

So I hoped to their web page and followed the instructions on how to add this plugin to an existing WordPress blog, and tried it by writing this post. I was glad to see that only 3 suggestions showed up when I clicked the proofreading button, reinforcing my belief that I am doing a decent job after all. The advantage for the corrections were all pretty clear and the added explanation was a welcome bonus!

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Even though I have only used this plugin for less than 30 minutes, I can totally see it becoming a favorite tool for my day-to-day use. If you’re interested in trying it or would like to get more information about it, I highly recommend that you watch their screen cast as well as read the documentation specific to WordPress.