Editing with Linguix

This "writing assistant" offers you an equivalent of MsWord's checking, including emails and webpages, and pretty good proofing, but its unique selling proposition is a host of templates and online advice plus testing facilities.

In July 2020 I received an offer of a cut price PRO version of the Linguix "writing assistant". This facility, which has a free Google extension, says its paid-for version gives you access to "700+ advanced grammar and style checks", a templates library and other features.

The offer included a hookup with Grammarly. What it offers more than Grammarly is the ability to create "snippets" of text to paste through shortcuts into your emails and texts. Its templates cover lots of business needs but also essays and emails.

For new writers in particular

So it may be particularly interesting to students and those who don't want to spend their days writing. Using U.S. statistics, Linguix calculates that the time you save by using its templates and snippets is $18 an hour and $18K a year.

It also integrates with Medium and LinkedIn as well as Google programs, and has free extensions for Edge and Firefox browsers.

There's even a educational program and it makes a point of being able to help non-English student write better in Boris Johnson's or Donald Trump's language: "Linguix AI-based writing assistant helps anyone learning English to polish their grammar, memorize new words, and develop a good writing style."

Performance

As for its performance, you have to cut and paste your text into the program window. What it offers is something like MsWord's spelling checker but with extra stylistic embellishments.

Checker

linguix demo page with errors highlightedLinguix demo page, click for full size

Linguix browser extension

linguix in a browserLinguix as a browser extension, click for full-size

Comparison with Grammarly

One website offered a comparison of Linguix with Grammarly (here). Both have free versions. Linguix is $5 a month if you pay for the year ($18.95 a month otherwise). Grammarly is $11.66 a month if you pay yearly ($29.95 a month otherwise).

Grammarly's score is 9.7 as against 7.5 for Linguix, though they do slightly different things.

Special Offer

The APPSUMO web site is offering a life-time deal on the Linguix premium version for $49 instead of $288 until 25 September or within 60 days of purchase. So you may want to check it out.

You can read reviews from users here. It has over 10,000 users and people seem to like it. They also reply quickly to queries both from customers and users at the Google store, and seem responsive.

There's a blog, an exam and tips about popular mistakes on the Linguix site.

It also offers, for free, several templates for emails, resumes, essays and more (previously, a Premium-only feature).

So I ran my specimen texts through Linguix.

Cons

I didn't like having to go over to the Internet to check my texts.

Results

Open University text

First, the Open University plain English text with its 78 sentences spattered with errors.

Document statistics

The Documents Statistics section reported the readability score as 60: "fairly easy to read". The reading time was put at 3 minutes 4 seconds. Average word length was 4.8 characters. Average sentence length clocked at 8.1.

Errors report

Linguix reported it had spotted 5 typos, 1 confused word, 2 grammatical mistakes and 1 typography error. It picked up an it's for an its. So that was fine. It also recognized that practiced (American) should be practised (British), my default language choice.

Other results were not so good:

In other words, it was really just a spell-checker.