By Mia Hanuska
Like many others, I am plagued by the worst disease of them all: Grammarly ads. Frustratingly everywhere, Grammarly ads have followed me wherever I go, from YouTube to TV to Instagram. I can’t escape them. And I regret to admit: I fell victim to them—once. Back in the bad ol’ days of COVID-19, when everything was shut down, and I wanted to write but couldn’t come up with anything, I would edit my friends’ stories. (Important note: this was before Grammarly became an AI service). Wanting their stories to be perfect, I looked to other programs to ensure my editing would be enough, and sure enough, little naïve Mia uploaded the work to Grammarly to see if she missed anything. That’s when Grammarly started to bug me: suggesting changes for words that changed entire meanings of sentences, telling me certain sentences were “too long,” and nagging for changes in punctuation that were straight-up just wrong.
And that’s the huge issue with programs like Grammarly—it can’t determine context for words and pushes for edits that simply aren’t correct. One English professor highlights this in her video, “Grammarly is Garbage, and Here’s Why,” where she put one of her academic papers through Grammarly and evaluated its advice. Not only did Grammarly not understand the different nuances of writing styles—it believes passive voice is always bad, despite its often intentional use by advanced writers—it suggested synonyms to words the professor used with completely different connotations. As Grammarly isn’t a human, it doesn’t understand the striking difference between denotations and connotations. Changing even just one word can have an extreme impact on an entire piece of writing, and the fact that Grammarly begs its users to alter certain words to make sentences “stronger” shows a clear problem with the program.
Aside from all the ethical issues with Grammarly being an AI program, and if we forget the basic writing mistakes it makes, could it be a helpful tool? Still no. Grammarly boasts that its users will “learn how to improve their writing” while using the program—but what is one learning from having their computer make all the changes for them? Most writers who voluntarily use Grammarly likely use it because they believe it makes their writing stronger, but they don’t have any idea why it makes their writing stronger. Why is a change important? Why should they avoid passive tense in this situation? Why is a certain sentence too wordy and why should they change it? It teaches none of the important skills writers need in order to improve their writing; it removes the critical thinking required to write.
This brings up another issue with Grammarly: it preys on young writers who don’t know better. Even when I was in 7th grade (COVID times) I could understand pretty basic edits, and sure, my writing wasn’t spectacular, but I had a general gist of grammar rules and how to write decently. Even now, while my writing is definitely nowhere close to perfect, I like to pride myself on writing not too terribly. But many people, especially in middle and high school, don’t know grammar or English rules. This means they can’t determine when Grammarly’s changes are actually harming their writing rather than improving it. Most people who don’t have a strong sense of connotations aren’t going to be able to tell when changing “improves” to “tweaks” alters their point completely. And that’s not to say it’s these writers’ faults for not knowing—basic English rules are often glossed over in school, and writing can be difficult. The issue is more with companies like Grammarly capitalizing off peoples’ lack of knowledge, and then the people who need to learn how to improve their writing never end up getting the help they need.
So please, if you use—or even worse, pay for—Grammarly, I urge you to take a step back and evaluate how much you actually need the program. Better yet, try to see how much better your writing could be if you just asked a peer, or a teacher, or anyone that’s not an AI writing assistant, to review your work and suggest edits. Using Grammarly in school does not give you the advantage you think it does, in reality, you’re just sabotaging your own writing. It’s the big two-five, let’s glow up and get off Grammarly.