Grammarly, the popular writing and communication software, now supports auto-generating citations and citation-style formatting checks. For St. John’s University students, that functionality is available free-of-charge. 

University students were first offered a free Grammarly Premium subscription halfway through the Fall 2021 semester, courtesy of Student Government, Inc. (SGi). Each student was emailed an activation link to start using their free subscription, and a reminder was sent to current students on Sept. 9, 2022. 

“Student Government Inc. is for students first, and we want to make the transition back to academic life that much smoother,”  SGi said in a letter emailed to students last year. “Therefore we are proud to announce that SGi will be providing free Grammarly Premium accounts to all undergraduate St. John’s students.”

At the time the free subscription was announced, students could use Grammarly to make sentences clearer, avoid plagiarism and improve word choice. But as midterms quickly approach in the Fall 2022 semester, University students have a new way to ensure their papers are cited correctly. 

Grammarly can be used to make citations in the MLA 9, APA 7 and Chicago 17 formats. Students can visit the Grammarly Citation Generator to create their citations, but many commonly-used databases support auto-citations.

With the Grammarly plugin installed, the service can generate citations for select websites without leaving the original source page. Supported sites include Wikipedia, Frontiers, Plos One, Science Direct, Sage Journals, PubMed, Elsevier, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Springer.

More importantly, Grammarly Premium can now check in-line and parenthetical citations for accuracy. The feature is part of Grammarly Editor — which already checks papers for accidental plagiarism — and looks for incorrect commas, parentheses or ampersands. 

SGi’s Grammarly premium program initially gave students access to writing insights and grammar suggestions. The software’s latest update is a game-changer for University students, and looks to be even more useful as midterm season approaches.

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