I Improved My Writing With Grammarly, and So Can You

Online writing tool Grammarly catches more errors than any spellchecker, says productivity expert Jill Duffy, but you have to be a confident enough writer to know when to take its suggestions and when to ignore them.

By Jill Duffy

What we say matters, and so does how we say it. With all the blog posts, cover letters, emails, and other text we produce, there are plenty of opportunities for people to judge us based on the content and quality of our writing. Writing is hard, and with the stakes so high, it’s worthwhile to get a little help where you can.

I’ve been trying out an app called Grammarly that analyzes writing and suggests improvements. Despite its name, Grammarly is much more than a grammar checker. It looks for repetitive words, jargon, homonyms, and hackneyed phrases, as well as words that nonnative speakers commonly misuse. Grammarly even has genre options so that its suggestions will be in line with the style of your writing, whether it’s academic work, a business document, or a more casual blog post.

When I first heard about the tool, I took it as a dare to test drive it and uncover its faults. I consider myself a writer before a technology enthusiast, and while I’m no expert in rhetoric and semantics, I do know a fair amount. I also know that computers are exceptionally bad judges of writing. Compared with the human brain of a native speaker, which understands deep complexities of language effortlessly, computers botch grammar all the time.

Grammarly Test Drive

I installed Grammarly on my computer and enabled its Web browser plugins as well. The desktop app analyzes any text that I feed into it, and the plug-ins review all the writing I do online in real time: emails, social media updates, blog posts, and so forth. It doesn’t support Google Docs, unfortunately, although you can copy and paste text or upload a document into the desktop app to run a check on it there.

First, Grammarly suggested I could improve my writing by swapping out vague words, like “great,” for something more descriptive. My editor slaps my wrist all the time for that very same offense, so I considered that suggestion a win for Grammarly. Next, it found a few simple typos, which I corrected by simply clicking on Grammarly’s suggested changes. It also pointed out that I use the word “really” way too frequently. Really? Yes, really. It had me there. Thanks, Grammarly.

Eventually, I landed on some suggestions that were a little off the mark. I wrote “office email,” for example, referring to email for business rather than personal communication, and Grammarly thought “email office” would be a more appropriate phrase. It didn’t like the word “taskers” either, which appeared in a direct quote. I wasn’t about to change it. Apparently, “walking down the hall” creates a squinting modifier that might confuse my readers. I disagree.

By and large, Grammarly’s suggestions are helpful. They steer writers to use more direct and clear language. The real trick to getting the most out of Grammarly is knowing when to have confidence in your word choices and ignore its suggestions. For example, Grammarly loves to point out when the passive voice is used (see what I did there?), but skilled writers use passives for style or to put emphasis on one part of speech over another.

Technology and Language

I got in touch with a few people who work for Grammarly, including computational linguist Mariana Romanyshyn. We talked by video conference about how hard it is for computers to parse language and what Grammarly is doing to make computing systems better at it.

“Language is very ambiguous,” she said. “It’s not always possible for a machine to detect even what part of speech a word is.” She said Grammarly makes incorrect suggestions sometimes and other times misses errors that should be flagged because of limitations with part-of-speech taggers. “This ambiguity is a really tricky task for computers to solve.”

I asked her for some examples. “There’s this classic linguistic sentence: The old man the boat. The word ‘man’ is the verb.” In other words, it means “those who are old are the ones who man the boat.”

“An automatic language processing system would never be able to detect that,” she said. Machines will always assume that “man” is a noun in this context. Another example well known to linguists is “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” It is a grammatically correct sentence, and please do puzzle over it for a moment before reading about how to parse it.

Romanyshyn also mentioned that while Grammarly already helps writers write better, it has new features in the works, too. “We’re planning to launch another version of Grammarly that’s going to incorporate different templates of writing and provide more enhancements for writing so that we’re not concentrating only on correctness but also on making the writing more cohesive, more coherent, and clearer.”

Grammarly Makes Writing Better

So many people need help with their writing. People on the job market looking to improve their resumes and cover letters, students working on assignments, business professionals drafting important documents and communication all have a vested interest in writing as clearly and as well as they can.

Grammarly isn’t cheap, however. There is a free limited version, but the paid Premium edition will cost you $29.95 per month, $59.95 if paid quarterly, or $139.95 if paid annually. But when you’re stuck on an important piece of writing that you know could be better, it may be money well spent.

Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com on August 6, 2019.