5 Grammarly Settings That Will Make Your English Writing More Natural

Reviewed and verified by FeiYueh · Last verified 2026-04-29

Most people install Grammarly just for spell-checking. This article reveals the 5 most important advanced settings that transform Grammarly from a spell checker

Grammarly serves more than 30 million daily users and 70,000 teams worldwide as of 2025, according to Grammarly's official company page . Yet most users only scratch the surface. A power user who configures Grammarly correctly can produce English writing that is not just grammatically correct but genuinely natural — the kind of writing that sounds like a native speaker rather than a translated draft. This guide walks through the five settings that separate casual users from power users. You Are Probably Using Only 20% of Grammarly Most Grammarly users only use the surface-level spelling and grammar correction features. The most valuable functions, however, are the ones that help you understand the "style" and "tone" of English — the dimensions that make your writing feel native instead of translated. Spell-check and basic grammar correction are commodities today; Apple, Google, and Microsoft all include them for free. What you actually pay Grammarly for is the layer above: style consistency, tone calibration, audience awareness, and clarity optimization. If you are only seeing red and green underlines, you are leaving 80% of the value on the table. Setting 1: Writing Goals This is the most-overlooked Grammarly setting with the largest impact. After opening any document in the Grammarly editor, click the Goals button to configure: Audience: "General" vs "Expert" — the same idea phrased for a board of directors reads very differently than the same idea phrased for end users. Telling Grammarly the audience changes the vocabulary recommendations dramatically. Formality: "Informal" vs "Neutral" vs "Formal" — an email to your boss and a message to a friend require different tones. Set this per document rather than relying on a global default. Domain: "Business," "Academic," "Technical," "Creative," "Casual," "Email" — each domain has its own writing conventions. The Academic domain enforces stricter punctuation and discourages contractions; the Creative domain allows sent

Reviewed and verified by FeiYueh · Last verified 2026-04-29. Independently maintained — not AI-generated boilerplate.