As anyone who’s stayed up all night painstakingly crafting an essay can tell you, writing is often a difficult and frustrating enterprise. But until something better comes along, humans are stuck with the written word and all of its exasperating aspects. Businesses especially must make sure that they communicate clearly with customers as well as employees. After all, office workers spend a significant amount of time trying to make sense of bad writing, which reduces efficiency and ultimately costs companies money.

Perhaps that’s why venture capitalists recently invested $110 million in the spell check startup Grammarly. The company uses machine-learning technology to study how people write, allowing its app to improve its functionality constantly by learning new phrases. As a result, Grammarly can do many other things besides alerting you about misspelled words. The app also offers recommendations about grammatical structure as well as proper word choice. Users can even install the service directly on their web browsers so they can ensure that every work-related email is error-free.

Grammarly has a daily user base of more than 6.9 million people, the bulk of which use the app for free. Some users pay $11.99 per month for a premium service that includes tools like a plagiarism detector and tips for specific genres of writing. Grammarly’s steadily growing popularity convinced its founders to search for outside investors. In fact, this is the first round of venture capital investment the business has received in its eight-year history. The company hopes this injection of cash will help Grammarly become an essential tool for aspiring writers, students and office employees.

Questions:

1. How do you think Grammarly can use their new venture capital investment to expand?
2. Do you think writing will continue to be a necessary skill for workers?

Source: Patrick Kulp, “Grammarly Raises $110 Million to Check Your Typos and Grammar Mistakes,” Mashable, May 9, 2017.