Is Grammarly Any Good?

Relying on AI technology might be ruining your editing skills

I edit for a living. One of my particular clients requires that I have Grammarly installed to help me with that process.

As a result, I use Grammarly almost every single day. I still read what I edit, comb each line, and choose what I think is best for the article. Many writers and editors may not be able to say the same.

Sure, you can use it as a little editing buddy to help you catch a few missed punctuations, or strangely-worded sentences, but relying on it to do all the editing work for you is not ideal. Especially if you edit for a living!

Here are 3 things that relying on Grammarly might be causing:

1. Losing Your Fundamentals

For those writers or editors that rely almost entirely on Grammarly, you might be losing the fundamentals that earned you the job in the first place.

How quickly grammar structures and writing rules fall out of your head when you let someone else do it for you. You can rapidly accept all of Grammarly’s suggestions for months, allowing it to “perfect” your documents, but what you’re really doing is weakening your editing muscles.

If an editor, that is reliant on Grammarly, is given a 2,000-word article to edit without the program, they might feel a little overwhelmed. Even though they are a professional. Even though they are well-trained.

When we rely on something long enough, losing it can make us question our abilities to stand on our own two feet.

2. Incorrect Suggestions

Grammarly tries to undermine my formatting to fix my paragraphs, most of the time. I follow strict rubrics for formatting from my clients. Their blogs or websites have specific styles that they try to maintain.

Grammarly couldn’t possibly know that. It makes decisions based on its programming, not on my style. Therefore, it can be hard to navigate it when it constantly tries to remind me that my very meticulously planned out formatting or headings structure needs to be “fixed.”

If you rely heavily on Grammarly, make sure you aren’t accepting all of its suggestions without reading them. You might end up ruining something you spent a lot of time on by doing it the “right” way instead of your way.

3. Blind Reliance

One of the biggest things that I see writers doing when they submit their work to me, is using Grammarly to polish up their articles.

That’s great! When they do minor edits before the article comes to me, it saves me time and effort. Plenty of us on Medium know what it is like to polish our writing before submitting it for publication.

However, these writers tend to take the “wrong” suggestions from Grammarly and implement them into their articles — I assume without reading it through first. Sure, those suggestions might be grammatically more correct. Still, they read like clunky, technical, and non-interesting sentences that sharply contrast to the conversational and friendly tone the rest of the article has.

It ruins the overall consistency and sometimes makes it feel like a robot wrote the article. Don’t rely on Grammarly to make your decisions for you.

Write well, but break a few rules to make your work interesting.

Helpful Exercises:

If you, like me, are required to use Grammarly for work or have been using it as a helpful editing assistant, consider doing a few exercises per week to keep your editing skills sharp.

Try:

• Editing a document entirely without Grammarly
• Writing a document and editing it yourself without Grammarly
• Edit a document using the “track changes” feature to check your work
• Rewrite or revise paragraphs and compare old to new
• Reformat your article into a new or interesting layout
• Scan for adverbs, incomplete sentences, or sentences that begin with prepositions (writers love to start sentences with “this” — I do it too sometimes…)

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