The problem with Grammarly

Grammarly commited the gravest error of all

Why you should avoid writing assistant software

Tempting.  Throw your faith behind a tech gadget that sells itself on totally solving spelling and grammar errors in everything everyone in your organization writes. Heck, a hundred years ago, people would crowd the wagons of unscrupulous grifters peddling bottles of nothing useful as a be-all-and-end-all for all that ails you.

Alarmingly, today in 2024, many institutions are adopting Grammarly to judge writing quality. This is producing a situation where the bizarre miscellany of the tool’s error detection becomes wrongly viewed as the correct grammar, which reinforces its perverted paradigm by luring others to use the software just so they might pass its judgement. Welcome to a downward quality spiral. You see, Grammarly is a piss-poor copy editor.

Grammarly isn’t the only writing assistant. Its competitors include Pro Writing Aid, Hemingway Editor, White Smoke, and dozens more. Nevertheless, I’ll pick on Grammarly because it’s the giant.

A whole lot of “other stuff” that may be warranted, or not

Though the company is private and opaque, Media Radar estimates Grammarly’s ad budget at US$100 million – through everything from social influencer sponsorships to TV spots, the company has trailblazed a business model out of making you believe your writing needs tech help and selling you their computer software.

They start with a foot in the door, luring you into its free version. While you’re there, it highlights spelling and grammar problems with your limited-character-count submission and gives you a little taste of engagement and tonal features. Then, it highlights a host of other problems that it will only help you with if you pay to upgrade. Their bread and butter is making you believe there are many problems with your writing and you need the expertise that only they can offer, if you would just cough up US$12 per month. (They also have enterprise plans that they sell to universities, organizations, and businesses.) The more “issues” they can point out with your text, the more it suits their sales objective.

Therefore, you get some fine fixes like simple spelling errors and grammatical violations. But you also get a whole lot of “other stuff” that may be warranted, or not. You’ll need the ability to judge which advice to heed and which to yeet. And let me mark this down: if you blindly accept all the advice that Grammarly provides, your writing will usually look foolish.

What’s “good grammar”?

What’s proper spelling? Well, what’s your region? Is colour spelled with a u? It depends where you are. Even the dictionaries are sometimes at odds: for instance, take the spelling of encyclopaedia. Encyclopedia? All you can do is agree upon a dictionary to hold up as cannon.

But what about grammar? Do you put periods after the letters in D.C.? What’s the correct way to denote the year 524 BCE? Yay or nay to the Oxford comma? Does Québec get an acute accent over the e? Professional writers obsess over these details precisely because they’re so contestable.

There is no single, universal authority on what constitutes proper spelling or grammar in English. Large organizations have style guides where they lay out standards designed to create uniformity of style in their publications. As you might expect, different media require different practices: The Globe and Mail Style Book is one of the more formal newsprint varieties, while The Canadian Press Stylebook is generally characterized by an affinity for brevity. The Chicago Manual of Style is frequently used in long-format nonfiction. Online, The Yahoo! Style Guide has widespread adoption. A government-issued The Canadian Style is free online, but definitely isn’t the definitive source for iron-clad grammar rules. Broadcasting, too, has style guides. At CBC radio, its scrappy style book negates itself early on: “Our style guide is not a Bible, or a set of rules to be followed slavishly, or simply lists of ‘do’s’ and ‘don’ts.’ It isn’t that easy.”

Simply impossible

To an organization, I would suggest that simply having some universal style standard is key, if only to get everyone on the same page and ensure consistency from one item to the next. It may be quite sufficient to simply adopt an appropriate, already-published style guide.

But there are other considerations like the application of your writing. Is it academic? Such writing demands much different standards from web blogs, or radio, or advertising. There is so much nuance, so much art. Even insofar as conventions can be agreed upon, English like all language is fluid and ever-evolving.

It’s simply impossible for Grammarly to accurately guide you to writing perfection. It doesn’t. It makes you paranoid so you buy its snake oil.

Organizations should not use Grammarly to judge writing quality. They should use a qualified human editor. Period.