Grammarly

For about three weeks now, I’ve been using an automated grammar and style checker called Grammarly. It’s similar to the grammar checker in Microsoft Word but with more robust capabilities. There’s a free version that checks grammar, spelling and punctuation, but since I write a blog post every day, I decided to try out the expanded “premium” version, which purports to also provide “clarity-focused sentence rewrites, tone adjustments, plagiarism detection, word choice, formality level, fluency, and additional advanced suggestions.”

Now, each time I draft a blog post, I copy and paste the text into Grammarly and then look at each of the corrections and suggestions it offers. Perhaps one in ten of those is helpful. Many are just wrong.

One might assume that Grammarly uses artificial intelligence to spot opportunities for improving one’s writing, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Building an AI capability would have involved uploading a huge number of high-quality writing samples so that a sophisticated computer could identify patterns that it could then apply to the writing of Grammarly users. The resulting suggestions would have reflected the nuanced ways in which good writers depart from the standard rules of grammar and style that we’re taught in school.

But Grammarly doesn’t demonstrate any such sophistication. Its advice appears to be entirely rules-based. For example, if you were to paste the sentence, “Before eating breakfast I made a few calls,” into Grammarly, it would advise that you add a comma after the word “breakfast.” It wants you to add a comma after any introductory phrase. But most professional writers and editors would omit the comma after a short phrase like the one in the example above unless it was necessary to avoid ambiguity. In fact, if you Google “use of a comma after an introductory phrase,” one of the hits you’ll get is a link to Grammarly’s own blog, which advises that the comma is optional after short introductory phrases. But Grammarly’s style-checking software doesn’t seem to know that.

Yet as comma-prone as the service can seem, it occasionally recommends removing a comma that should be there. When I wrote in my recent post about our neighborhood luminaria, “Virtually everyone who celebrates Christmas participates, and the effect can be breathtaking,” Grammarly suggested removing the comma after “participates.”

Another weakness is that Grammarly suggests making changes in order to comply with style “rules” that few professional writers adhere to. It will prompt you to rewrite a sentence that ends with a preposition, for example, or which contains a split infinitive. Fortunately, you can tell it to stop making those particular recommendations.

Some of Grammarly’s advice is worth considering but can’t be blindly followed. For example, it invariably suggests rewriting sentences that are in the passive voice. In a recent post it suggested that I rewrite, “Projects were captured on pink sticky notes. . .” That may have been good advice; perhaps I should have written, “We captured projects on pink sticky notes…” But later in that same post I wrote, “She switched to goggles and a mask while she was in the airport, which was mobbed.” Grammarly noted that “which was mobbed” was in the passive voice and suggested I change it — to what, I can’t imagine.

Many of Grammarly’s suggestions are just plain wrong. When I wrote that my friend Marilia “had to handle a huge number of administrative tasks” before going home to Brazil, Grammarly asserted that the word “huge” is often overused and suggested I replace it with “vast” or “considerable.” Neither of those words struck me as appropriate for the context, but I took the point that “huge” might be overused, so I changed the phrase to “scads of administrative tasks.” At that point Grammarly suggested that the new phrase might be wordy and offered to change it to “administrative tasks scads.” Say what?

But all of that notwithstanding, Grammarly has been helpful. After publishing a post, I often find that I’ve omitted a word or made some other dumb mistake. Even though I read my draft posts several times before publishing them, I often manage to miss some kind of simple error. (I guess I see what I intended to write rather than what I actually wrote.) Grammarly catches these, and I haven’t discovered any such mistakes after publishing a post since I started using it.

It has also occasionally made suggestions I wouldn’t have thought of but which improve the writing. These usually involve reordering a sentence to make it flow better.

The fact that so many of the suggestions Grammarly makes are bad ones means that I couldn’t recommend it for a poor writer, who might not be able to discern which suggestions to accept and which to ignore. And the fact that such a small proportion of its advice is helpful would make me reluctant to recommend it to a good writer, who might have no patience for wading through all the bad suggestions just to find the occasional good one.

I suppose the kind of person most likely to benefit from Grammarly is one who knows good writing when they see it but who is either a bit careless or not good at proofing their own work. Presumably, a person like that could use another set of “eyes” on their writing, but also would be able to tell when Grammarly’s advice is good and when it’s bad.