5 Fun and Free Online Grammar Games

This guest post by Maria Rainier.

Whether you’re a gram­mar nerd or learn­ing Eng­lish as a new lan­guage, we all know that prac­tice makes per­fect. Not all of us have the time to prac­tice gram­mar ins and outs, because our sched­ules keep us con­stantly on the go. But what bet­ter way to get in some Eng­lish gram­mar prac­tice once in a while than with an addic­tive, and portable, online game? Next time you have a few min­utes to spare or become bored with you lat­est attempt to con­quer Words with Friends, try out one of these sim­ple and addic­tive gram­mar games avail­able online.

1. Word Chal­lenge
This is a cool one. It’s addic­tive because it’s timed. Ques­tions mainly cover vocab­u­lary and word usage. Get the app here.

2. Gram­mar Up
This was designed based on com­mon areas cov­ered by the TOEIC Eng­lish pro­fi­ciency test and is geared toward busi­ness usage and vocab­u­lary. There are ten dif­fer­ent gram­mar cat­e­gories, and stu­dents can choose games based on those cat­e­gories. It’s a fun way to pass the time, great for ESL stu­dents, and a good refresher for native Eng­lish speak­ers. Check it out here.

3. The Gram­mar Goril­las
This is a cute game where play­ers iden­tify parts of speech in order to get bananas for gorilla friends. There are begin­ner and advanced set­tings. Try it free here.

4. Sink or Swim
The object of the game is to stay above water. If you make a mis­take, you will sink fur­ther below the sur­face; cor­rect answers keep you afloat. Try it here.

5. The Pre­fixes Game
Play­ers fit block together to build a tower and have to select pieces with the right shape and pre­fix in order to build the tower higher. Try it here.

Author Bio:
Maria Rainier is a free­lance writer and blog junkie. She is cur­rently a res­i­dent blog­ger at First in Edu­ca­tion where she writes about edu­ca­tion, online col­leges, online degrees etc. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gar­den­ing, swim­ming, and avoid­ing her laptop.

WhiteSmoke 2010+ T-Gen Review

I just started using WhiteSmoke T-Gen, also known as WhiteSmoke 2010+ “Text Genome,” the lat­est ver­sion of this flag­ship Eng­lish gram­mar, spelling, and style checker, and here are my first impres­sions. I was skep­ti­cal at first because I’ve had some prob­lems with the soft­ware in the past, but the pro­gram now seems much smoother and more sta­ble than pre­vi­ous ver­sions.  While using the auto­matic cor­rec­tion fea­ture in Word Press used to cause it to crash, I was pleas­antly sur­prised to see that it now seems to work fine.

T-Gen also gives you some inter­est­ing sta­tis­tics about your writ­ing on the right-hand side of the work area. You can “mouse over” these stats to get more infor­ma­tion about what they mean. Learn more about WhiteSmoke T-Gen. Go here for a full review and videos about the WhiteSmoke gram­mar checker or click here for a short WhiteSmoke review. Over­all, the gram­mar and spelling checker is bet­ter than ever and crashes or inter­feres with other pro­grams and soft­ware much less often. Speed is also improved. If you want to try it before you buy, click here for a Free 3-Day Trial.

WhiteSmoke Review–“Very Good English Grammar Checker, But Not Perfect ”

A lot has been writ­ten about the WhiteSmoke writ­ing soft­ware prod­uct which is fea­tured here on this blog.  The soft­ware checks gram­mar, spelling, style and offers cor­rec­tions and sug­ges­tions. Over­all, I feel that WhiteSmoke offers some good value and I use it often. It is espe­cially help­ful for spot­ting miss­ing and dupli­cate words, and basic gram­mar and spelling mis­takes. It’s like hav­ing a per­sonal proof­reader, with an Eng­lish degree, check­ing my writ­ing. The soft­ware is quite sophis­ti­cated as it asso­ci­ated with a com­puter net­work that “reads” news­pa­pers and other mate­r­ial, daily, to stay up to date with the rules and prac­ti­cal uses of writ­ten English.

Now even though it’s basi­cally a good prod­uct, it is not with­out flaws. First, it can cause other text edit­ing pro­grams to crash if they are both open at the same time and you use WhiteSmoke to auto­mat­i­cally cor­rect your writ­ing rather than just flag­ging it for errors. For exam­ple, you can acti­vate WhiteSmoke by push­ing the “F2” key on your key­board and the soft­ware will go ahead and check your text for errors (inter­net con­nec­tion require). Some­times, if you ask WhiteSmoke to not only check your writ­ing, but fix it also, it causes other pro­grams, like Word­Press, on which this blog is writ­ten by the way, to inex­plic­a­bly crash. This isn’t really a big deal as you can reopen the crashed pro­gram again (save your work before open­ing WhiteSmoke). But it can be a minor annoy­ance. I some­times deal with this issue by mak­ing the cor­rec­tions myself rather than let­ting WhiteSmoke do it auto­mat­i­cally, which is when most of the crashes hap­pen. So I just use WhiteSmoke to sur­vey my text for cor­rec­tions, but I work on these myself.

WhiteSmoke  2010 FREE 3-Day Trial

Sec­ond, there is a lot of crit­i­cism that WhiteSmoke isn’t per­fect, that it makes mis­takes. Well, duh! It’s a com­puter pro­gram, not a per­son. Since when did com­put­ers ever inter­pret lan­guage per­fectly? They may be good or bet­ter at play­ing chess than a human, but with lan­guage it’s a dif­fer­ent story. Lan­guage con­tains so many idioms and con­text sen­si­tive mean­ings, I doubt a machine will ever be per­fect for gram­mar check­ing. (Spelling is a dif­fer­ent story–that can be auto­mated.) So my basic feel­ing is the pro­gram is good enough. I don’t expect per­fec­tion out of it and it’s use­ful enough to stay on my desk­top. Newer ver­sions of the pro­gram include WhiteSmoke 2010 and WhiteSmoke T-GEN, to be reviewed in future posts. Please let me know your thoughts and expe­ri­ences with this product.

If you want to learn more about WhiteSmoke, get a free 3-day trial, or watch some videos I made about it, you can check out this page:

English-Writing-Tools.com

Over­all: WhiteSmoke is basi­cally a good prod­uct with some minor flaws.  It helps me to feel more con­fi­dent in my writ­ing  and it’s a decent value for the money.

(This post was checked by WhiteSmoke. And for dis­clo­sure pur­poses, the owner of this blog, Mount Baldy Press, Inc. has a com­mer­cial rela­tion­ship with the company.)

Free WhiteSmoke Grammar Checker

Did you know that WhiteSmoke offers a free 3-day trial of their gram­mar check­ing soft­ware? You can find it on this page: Free Gram­mar Checkers

WhiteSmoke English Software

This soft­ware is what I use to check my writ­ten Eng­lish gram­mar and spelling:

Get WhiteSmoke Here

WhiteSmoke 2010 Released-New emphasis on English punctuation

WhiteSmoke has released the new ver­sion 2010 of their well-known soft­ware prod­uct, which I have writ­ten about exten­sively in this blog. There appear to be updates to the graph­i­cal inter­face and how the soft­ware checks Eng­lish punc­tu­a­tion among other improve­ments.  I highly sug­gest you check it out. Click Here for More WhiteSmoke Info

The True Story of How Dr. Hein Improved His English Writing

Get More Infor­ma­tion About Eng­lish Gram­mar Soft­ware Includ­ing Free Instruc­tional Videos, Report, and 15-minute Phone Tech­ni­cal Sup­port and Con­sul­ta­tion with Dr. Hein

Learn More About Dr. Simeon Hein

Visit the WhiteSmoke Homepage

Now Get My Free Report: “How to Get the Most Out of WhiteSmoke: Features and Tips for Best Use”

I am now offer­ing a free 6-page report that cov­ers tricks and tips for get­ting the most out of  WhiteSmoke soft­ware. I’ve noticed a cou­ple of things that make using the soft­ware eas­ier and you can get this report if you pur­chase your copy of the soft­ware through this link or from my English-Writing-Tools.com web­site. Just email me with your order infor­ma­tion, includ­ing time and date, and I will email a PDF copy of the report.