Grammarly, Ulysses and Lost Links

I’m a long-time subscriber of Grammarly, the subscription-based grammar checking and proofreading service. I’m the kind of writer that needs grammar and style checking. No matter how many times I review a draft, the round trip through Grammarly finds some sort of error. It’s tough to proofread your own writing, and incorporating this final check in my process has saved me from some otherwise mortifying bloopers. The cost of a premium Grammarly subscription feels low when compared to publishing articles with these dumb writing errors.

I use the writing app Ulysses for all my published writing. I love its distraction-free environment and its ability to publish directly to WordPress. Last year, Ulysses introduced a solid grammar and style checking tool of its own called Revision Mode. It’s a powerful proofreading tool, and I appreciate how convenient it is to check my text without leaving the app. But, at least for me, it’s not as comprehensive in its error-checking capabilities as Grammarly. When it was first released, I corrected drafts of my writing first in Ulysses with a follow-up check in Grammarly. Grammarly would always find additional mistakes that Ulysses missed. In addition, Grammarly points out wordy or unclear sentences and offers up alternative wording suggestions that are usually pretty good.

Grammarly doesn’t support the Markdown file format that Ulysses uses, so checking the text of a Ulysses document is done by copying and pasting between the apps. The problem with this approach is that any links to external sites get lost in this round-trip process.

I encountered this glitch recently after I publishing a blog post with a bunch of links to other websites. The links in the post-Grammarly document retained the appearance of a proper link with its blue underlined font, but clicking on any of them in the published article took you nowhere. The embedded link instructions were wiped clean. I had to hastily edit and republish the post once I discovered the error.

After this snafu, I contacted the support team at Ulysses and received the following guidance on how to send drafts to Grammarly and back without losing any data. I’m sharing here in case others might benefit from these instructions:

How to Preserve Links in the Round Trip between Ulysses and Grammarly:

When you copy text from Ulysses to Grammarly, perform a right-click › Copy as › Markdown. When you are done in Grammarly, copy the text there as would normally do, but then in Ulysses, right-click again › Paste from › Markdown (not Paste as…). Doing so will preserve any Markdown links in your Ulysses document.

I’ve tested this on both the Mac and iPad versions of Ulysses, and it works perfectly.