Grammarly Errs All the Time
My feature image search was “AI is stupid”
I have written about the deficiencies of the AI bots employed by various platforms. In AI Reimagined and Repurposed, There is nothing less intelligent than rationality not tempered by emotions, I wrote about the misuse and/or poor design of AI algorithms to self-moderate social media. Now I set my sights on the likes of Grammarly and Hemingway Writer.
I rise up to write this article after reading Dew Langrial’s How To Become an Effective Writer in One Day, This 2-minute writing advice is useful for every new writer, which is a good piece, and somehow lead me to Sabana Grande’s How to Have Your Articles Instantly Published by Editors, The biggest problems encountered by editors on this platform, which is chock-full of useful information, but with which I pick this very large bone:
Let Grammarly help you to increase your income by fixing your punctuation or spelling errors. Download it now!
Arrrrggghhhhh!!
Also, editors cry when they see articles that are almost completely underlined by Grammarly in red — meaning that they’re filled with grammar issues. (Yes, most editors across Medium use Grammarly.) Editors that cry are not fast editors.
I could cry now.
First of all, Medium should create a new category for publication staff — Gatekeeper, aka, the lazy editor. Chances are most of those grammar errors are due to the large number of EFL writers here on Medium. They need our help to learn, as opposed to relying on Grammarly which will not correctly translate their intent and lose their voice. What say, you Karen Madej?
FC’sS, (where are you GranPa-Festus when I need you), Grammarly cannot even conceive of the context required to discern the difference between a verb and its homonym-noun-of-the-same-spelling:
I’m not sure to which text that replies?
Grammarly flagged “text” as an improper verb-form. I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried.
As I hope you now see, or if not, that you soon will, Medium’s suggestion, endorsed by far too many publications, that writers employ Grammarly for anything beyond obvious spelling errors, is artificially unintelligent. (I am also at a loss as to why Google’s quite proficient built-in spell-checker does not function in the on-line version of Medium’s story writer nor story-editor.) (I may revert to writing in MS Word and copy-pasting into Medium — which reminds me, why Medium, why, why do editors not have a track-changes option?!)
As I discussed as a tangent in 5D Ascension = Extinction, Species-wide enlightenment would be the end of days:
Why am I using in-line links and not the vanity-feeding, not-missable and quite pretty, if the author chose an eye-grabbing image, embedded links? While I am an archetype for non-conformity, I have learned, appropriately noting for the prompt, not to stubbornly cut off my nose to spite my face. While I hate senseless rules, apparently Medium’s curation bots dislike embedded links, and swimming against that current serves no one any good.
Grammarly, which has the brains of a first-grader and the imagination of a misanthrope, wanted to change “current” to currently, until I inserted a comma, which is not necessary, and have since removed — it also wanted to completely incorrectly replace the have-before-since with has [in this sentence].
It’s maddening.
I once had a deeply personal and beautiful story rejected by a publication because, as I now paraphrase, “Now that we have grown we require a minimum of editorial quality…we suggest you download Grammarly and Hemingway Editor and make corrections and then you are free to re-submit.”
GFYS. Are you kidding me?! You could not say that if you had read, The Greatest Love Story the Universe Has Ever Known, “Limitless undying love which shines around [us] like a million suns and calls [us] on and on across the Universe” — John Lennon. Instead, I submitted it to Jean Carfantan, and publication quickly ensued.
Here are two versions of the same content that I wrote as my digression in yesterday’s What is Medium’s SEO Description Setting, Examples of replacing the default with a well-written description of your own. I wrote the first in my preferred style, which the Hemingway that wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls would endorse, and the second in the style encouraged by Medium curation guidelines and that the ill-named Hemingway Writer would approve:
I write this article now because as an editor for ILLUMINATION and our mirror-image, I see many good articles that are worthy of search engine hits that won’t receive them unless I either revise the SEO description myself, which I often do, particularly if I feel the article has substance (I try to pick and choose what I edit accordingly — I do no one any service being a cue-clearer), or bring it to the writer’s attention to do themselves so they will learn. If I do it for them I do not feel they learn even when I point out that I did so.
Why do I write this article now? I do so because as an editor for ILLUMINATION and our mirror-image, I see many good articles that are worthy of search engine hits that won’t receive them. That is unless I revise the SEO description myself. I often do this. Particularly if I feel the article has substance. I try to pick and choose to edit articles that I find substantive. I do no one any service being a cue-clearer. If I do not revise it myself, I bring it to the writer’s attention to do themselves so they will learn how to do it. If I do it for them, I do not feel they learn even when I point out that I did so.
Which version do you prefer? Feel free to disappoint me. I do wish Medium had footnote-functionality, in which case I would have so-dropped my parenthetical.
Ok, enough for now. Thank you for reading.
In Rama I create,
Marcus