I'm sure that the people who work at Grammarly are good citizens, great at cocktail parties, and willing to save kittens from trees, burning buildings, etc. I want to start proleptically by saying my beef with Grammarly is not with its employees, nor is it necessarily with the founders, owners, and/or investors of the company. My goal with this long-overdue post in the Oratoria is to warn you--the language-interested reader who desires to have excellent if not flawless writing for whatever your writing needs may be--that what you want from Grammarly is not necessarily what you're going to get. Because it can't be. So what's a writer to do? I've got a few suggestions for you, some of which you'll like more than others.
What is Grammarly?
Grammarly is a company that is heavily invested--to the tune of approximately $110 million, primarily from five venture-capital firms--in "using artificial intelligence to help people with the substance and content of what they write," according to CEO Brad Hoover.
My gloss on this is that Grammarly is a glorified version of the frankly adorable paperclip in ancient iterations of Microsoft Word, except that the paperclip gave users pointers about how to use Word in addition to pointing out typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors. Grammarly sticks to the errors (Wikipedia says that Grammarly checks 250 million rules, but I can't verify that anywhere else, so consider it hearsay at this point). I would also be remiss not to note that this claim is problematic insofar as changes to grammar do not necessarily equate to "substan[tive]" changes to meaning, let alone writing. Chomsky proved that decades ago.
What is it, as a service? Imagine paying a monthly fee to have Word check your spelling and grammar. Imagine paying a monthly fee so that you can have a plugin for your browser that does what Word does in checking your spelling and grammar as you, say, type an email (or a blog post). That's what people pay for when they pay for Grammarly. The algorithms that the company uses to help narrow down the probability that certain conditions have or have not been met in any combination of words (i.e., that sentences are grammatical or not) are maybe better than Word's, more refined, more nuanced, more-regularly updated (but does it constitute the development of artificial intelligence? Well, the mere use of algorithms does not artificial intelligence make), but even proving the validity of that assertion would depend on which test is being administered.
What's So Problematic about Grammarly?
Nothing, except that it's only marginally helpful.
"But wait!" you say. "I use Grammarly, and just like in the commercials, it saved me from using a typo or misplacing a modifier in that email to my boss. Yikes!" Sure, but Word might have been able to help you catch that, too. For free.
What's really problematic was a problem that started well before the point at which you, the Grammarly user, thought to yourself, "I better make sure my boss doesn't catch any errors in what I write for work." Here's a brief summary of the layers upon layers of problems that led you to Grammarly:
- You weren't taught properly to rely upon--not just how to use but that you need to use--a proper handbook. Anything that you feel unsure about, you could look up in a writer's handbook like The Everyday Writer or A College Grammar of English, depending on your needs. A cheap handbook that I love to recommend is The Easy Writer by Andrea Lunsford. Everything that Grammarly "knows" is in that handbook, and you can get it for less than the price of one month's subscription to Grammarly.
- You weren't taught the basics of grammar. When you open up a handbook to learn about why "which" needs a comma but "that" doesn't, you may be thrown off by terms like "restrictive." And what's a "modifier," anyway? "Gerund"? Who is "Gerund"? Your parents (and you) should have gone to your school board and demanded to be challenged in your English classes. Shakespeare is important, too, but understanding grammar is far, far more important insofar as you need to understand the fundamentals of the linguistic tools you use to navigate your world each day of your life. Which leads to the next point...
- The education and teacher-training system set you up to be ignorant. This is partly because of standardized testing and the need to teach lots and lots of things to students. Learning grammar takes time, especially if it's not intuitive (chemistry isn't intuitive for me, so I empathize). Frankly, I'd bet that if you had a map of the U.S. and put a dot for each city/town in which at least one school has an expert in English language or even someone with more than six hours of English-grammar college-level education, the map would have fewer than 50 tiny specks. Instead, we have teachers who aren't equipped to teach anything about grammar and usage, so why do we assume our students will know it? Don't blame the teachers, though...
- I put a lot of blame on my own field, rhetoric and composition, for downplaying the importance of teaching the formal aspects of language for the sake of promoting the cultural aspects of communication. Yes, it's true that there are multiple dialects of English and that communities should have the right to the use of their own dialect, that no dialect is inherently better than another. However, if our students can't describe the ways in which a dialect operates and differs from another dialect--if they can't identify articles, verbs, syntactic complexity, etc., and analyze why, rhetorically, speakers and writers might use those elements for a purpose in any given context--then our attention to the cultural aspects of communication are pointless, because we're just telling people that something is a certain way without empowering them to understand how it is. The "social turn" in my field should have been a time when we doubled down on teaching grammar, linguistics, and usage and then coupling them with cultural rhetorics and linguistics; instead, we chucked the one that looked like science and embraced the one that we thought was important by itself, for itself. I argue that our students would be more empowered if they could explain how and why they are communicating or how and why others' communication affects their identities and rights; right now, few can.
- Because of the highly conditional nature of language--a function of the highly conditional nature of human social and cognitive contexts--what counts as an error to one person may not to another at any given point in time. It wasn't until grad school that I learned how to use an em dash properly. Now I find out that I'm applying the rule I learned far too stringently--that it's okay to use as an extendo tool like this. It drives me nuts when people do it, even though it's something I used to do all the time. I have a different set of rules in my head. What rules does Grammarly have? How adaptable is its "reasoning"? Can you talk back and forth with the algorithm about what the rhetorical repercussions are of having used an em dash in the way that you did, in any given context? Can Grammarly's alleged AI help you weigh the cost-benefit for a nuanced audience? How do you know that something is an error? How does Grammarly know? Who gets to decide what's right and wrong in language use?
Grammarly fixes exactly none of these problems. It doesn't educate the user. It doesn't advocate for better teacher education to empower writers to be able to control their own language. It takes money from people and puts a bandaid over all of this. What's more, when people use Grammarly, they can't tell whether the fixes proposed by the Grammarly system are actually fixes. In this way, Grammarly is kind of like going to a psychic. Your psychic might be 100% right that you shouldn't marry your fiance, but you don't know that, and there's no way for you to verify it until it's too late. Similarly, unless you can open up a handbook and point to the place where the handbook explains that no, you don't need a comma before a coordinating conjunction that splices two independent clauses in most cases (or what "coordinating conjunction" and "independent clause" even mean), among any number of additional rules about commas, then you don't know whether Grammarly has given you an accurate fix when it suggested deleting that one comma. You are at Grammarly's mercy, in that case.
Don't Even Get Me Started with the Plagiarism-Detection Service
Companies like Turnitin and, now, Grammarly are compiling gigantic databases of writing. This should give each of you pause. What are they doing with your writing? Is your privacy protected? Which copyrights have you given away by virtue of having used these services? Read all about it here.
What's the Solution?
I suppose we have to find a time machine and go back to the '80s and tell rhet-compsters not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There isn't enough R&D funding for that at the moment, I hear, so instead you have a range of options that are better than Grammarly:
- Less-costly options:
- Merely using Word (or whatever word processor you prefer)
- Using a handbook. This will take more time than using Word, because you'll have to spend time with it, learning about grammar, before you can really get optimal use out of it.
- More-costly options:
- Take a class on writing, but look at the syllabus first to make sure that there's plenty of attention paid to grammar and usage
- Better yet, take an introductory linguistics class. Then buy a handbook; you'll suddenly find it much more approachable.
- Ideally, you'd be able to secure the services of a professional editor. I negotiate payment plans for students (and, really, anyone else who knows they're going to have difficulty paying a single lump sum for professional help), and many other copyeditors will, too. Yes, it will be more than $15/month, but the monthly subscription price that you're paying to Grammarly is really just for wishful thinking. If you're only using Grammarly, then you'll still need to have your writing checked over by a professional to ensure that it's actually correct because, hey, you don't know enough to know whether the automated advice given to you by Grammarly is worth anything or not. Kinda undercuts the value of the subscription, doesn't it?
I hate to be the bearer of bad news for those of you who thought that Grammarly was the panacea for your writing woes. What I'm trying to tell you is that it's actually much more important that you understand how writing works so that you'll be able to evaluate whether you're getting good advice, whether it's from an algorithm or from a copyeditor such as me. Both the algorithm and I can make suggestions for improving your grammaticality, but I can make suggestions and changes that affect your writing qua writing, not qua grammatical strings of words that may or may not be meaningful or effective. And I can teach you about how I've done it, if you want to know.