Grammarly

Grammarly is an online website that was founded in 2009 by Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmetro Lider. While the website itself was founded in 2009, the Web Editor was not launched until 2010. Grammarly has over two hundred team members and over twenty million daily users and can be accessed by everyone, for free, on Google, or just about any other search engine. The website offers three different accounts. The first account is their free account which helps improve and strengthen everyday writing.  With the Premium account, they offer more advanced grammar checks, an advanced plagiarism detector, and enhanced vocabulary suggestions. The Premium account has a few different prices based on how you pay with their cheapest plan being the annual pay; it is $11.66 per month and is billed as one payment of $139.95. The last account they offer is their Business account which allows a business to buy the account and allow their workers to use Grammarly in order to make their writing more engaging and clear. 

With a free account, they offer assistance with a multitude of websites including Gmail, Facebook, and other very popular sites. It will go through what has been typed in order to find mistakes or ways to improve the writing. If it finds a mistake or an improvement, it will underline the word or phrase and all the writer has to do is hover over the underlined portion with the mouse, and it will allow the writer to fix their mistake. In the account settings, they offer a tab to customize each user’s account by offering a personal dictionary, which allows a user to add words that they do not want to be flagged as a misspelling. They also offer to check writing in American, British, Canadian, or Austalian rules. 

On a Macbook laptop, when visiting their website, they offer users the option to download Grammarly to Safari. If the user chooses to do so, they offer assistance on anywhere a user writes on the Web.  This website would be useful to anyone that has to write. Students in college and high school could use this website to proofread their work before turning in an assignment. Anyone with a career that involves writing could use this website to make sure their writing is correct. This website was not intended for one specific audience but, instead, built for a wide audience in order to help everyone improve their writing.

Works Cited 

Grammarly. Grammarly Inc, 2019.https://www.grammarly.com/?q=brand&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=brand_f1&utm_content=76996511046&utm_term=grammarly&matchtype=e&placement=&network=g&gclid=CjwKCAjwxt_tBRAXEiwAENY8hSwUm-J_0Wd2_rrvdpRUh0TzSxJbbp3M06wolkAh1x1OLYMFeVvn_hoCBIIQAvD_BwE. Accessed 29 Oct 2019.

The Paris Review

Theparisreview.org is a website affiliated with the quarterly literary magazine The Paris Review. The magazine was founded in Paris by Harold Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton in 1953, but the website didn’t make its debut until 1995. Nadja Spiegelman is the current online editor, though content on the site taken from the magazine would have originally been under its own editor, Emily Nemens. The site, geared towards enticing the reader to purchase a subscription to the magazine, offers limited access to the archived content on the website. Despite this, an abundance of free content can be accessed by anyone.

The homepage of theparisreview.org contains a mix of both free content and previews of content behind a paywall, though a section titled “The Daily” consists of daily articles that are available for free. The Daily began on June 1st 2010 with a letter from the editor stating the purpose of the daily posts were to keep readers engaged in-between issues of The Paris Review. All posts on The Daily since its inception are accessible and cover vastly different topics, from an article praising Peanuts cartoons to a recounting of an attempt to recreate Italian dishes mentioned in the novel The Leopard.

The site also features submitted fiction, poetry, interviews, and art/photography. While access to all of these requires a subscription, one work is featured daily in each category and can be freely viewed. Podcasts featuring interviews with writers and readings of their works are available, though the podcast is still somewhat new with only two available seasons. A video section links to the organization’s YouTube channel, which offers a few dozen relatively short videos. The majority of these videos feature authors discussing their first publication.

Works Cited

The Paris Review, https://www.theparisreview.org/. 2019.

Poets.org

Poets.org is a website created in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, a nonprofit organization founded by Marie Bullock in 1934. It is funded in part by individual contributions and members, as well as government programs, private foundations, and corporations. Though Poets.org is run by President and Executive Director Jennifer Benka, a Board of Chancellors consults with the staff on creative matters and a Board of Directors oversees finances, programs, and plans for the future. While the Chancellors are exclusively poets, the Board of Directors consists of an eclectic collection of more executive occupations. The website offers a catalogue of poems, teaching materials, backgrounds on poets, local events, and literary job listings. The entirety of this information is available for free, unobstructed by advertisements, on their website.

Most prominently presented on the site is the poem-a-day service in which one may sign up and be emailed a selected poem everyday. The daily poem is displayed on the site’s homepage and includes a picture of the author along with a direct quote from them regarding the poem. The homepage also contains links to their collection of over 11,000 poems, ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to poets such as Gary Jackson who are still writing to this day. Information on the authors of these archived works is easily accessible through their archive of over 3,000 poets, though the amount available can vary wildly from poet to poet depending on their perceived status or tenure as a writer. Joy Harjo, one of the aforementioned chancellors on the site, has several paragraphs listing her accolades while details on Ashley Toliver are limited to two sentences.

Poets.org also offers more practical content in the form of lesson plans and suggested poems for teachers as well as a consistently updated list of literary and arts jobs that may be of interest to English majors. Though the site does include “poetry near you” events, the vast majority of the events listed are located in more densely populated areas, especially New York. The Academy of American Poets subsection of the website, somewhat hidden at the bottom of the homepage, links to programs, prizes, and awards offered by the site’s governing organization.

Works Cited

Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, 2019, https://poets.org/.