If you peruse the internet regularly, you’ve probably fallen victim to Grammarly’s unyielding digital marketing campaign. We’re looking into setting up a support group for those who got hit the worst, but in the meantime I’d like to discuss the value of the writing-aid service Grammarly provides.
Spellchecks are ubiquitous. Even established writers use them. But where Grammarly differs is that it offers an all-round language assistant, suggesting alternate words and phrasings, proposing grammar improvements and venturing to improve your written work. If you write ‘important’, it will suggest ‘paramount’ and ‘vital’. If you write ‘pretty’, it will suggest ‘beautiful’ or ‘stunning’. But it goes beyond an automatic thesaurus. If you write ‘the scope of the project’, it will wag its finger, preferring ‘the project’s scope’. If you start a sentence with ‘Currently …’ it will tell you to insert a comma after it.
The issue with this kind of tool is that it doesn’t make you a better writer. In fact, in removing part of the corrective burden, it hinders the process by which people become better writers. Grammarly can’t help you express yourself differently, and, by tweaking and polishing what language you do put down it discourages the exercise altogether. There are limitless ways to frame ideas — the same topic, the same core meaning can differ hugely in engagement depending on how it was framed and worded.
Grammarly’s tinkering toolkit offers you the chance to polish an average piece of text so that you don’t have to overhaul the structure and find a better foundational frame. For example, instead of having to think up metaphors and imagery to inject some excitement into your prose, with Grammarly you are encouraged to engage in the simple act of word-swapping and punctuation-altering.
The idea that writing can be transformed through minor tweaks is the main flaw. The idea that you can relax, churn out language as you normally would and then polish it off to buff quality. This can certainly upgrade your prose, but not in the same way that a rewrite and overhaul can. What’s more, in restricting your corrections to superficial plasters and ointments, you guarantee that you remain nestled within the same habits, the same patterns and verbal pathways you always use. Of course, some people won’t care. Their job or lifestyle simply demands that they write a lot — they’re not interested in upgrading their language skills. But for those that are, Grammarly encourages shortcuts that may deter you from the more crucial tasks. A parallel could be drawn to the immune system. Taking frequent medicine and antibiotics may successfully thwart the invasion of foreign entities, but it also deprives your body of the chance to learn for itself how to counter the invader.
So, what to do instead? Read great writers. Not archaic figures like Shakespeare and Dante — new faces that play in the same linguistic sandbox as you. Stephen King, Cormac McCarthy, George Orwell. Whoever is to your taste; but make sure they’re good writers. Reading bland prose will do nothing for you. Grammarly actually steals a few quotes from Mr King for its all-out marketing assault, such as the rather convenient statement: ‘To write is human, to edit is divine.’ King here is referring to self-editing, the practice of re-reading and altering one’s own prose. In fact, he often promoted the practice of waiting a long period after completion of the first draft, re-reading and then completely re-hauling the work with a fresh perspective. Another quote by Mr King that Grammarly curiously left out of its social media campaign is: ’You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself’. Grammarly’s service gently nudges you away from these hard-won lessons.
Like all tools, Grammarly can be used well, and it can be used badly. Many users claim to ignore 80-90% of its suggestions, using it only for spellchecking and basic grammar. There is nothing wrong with this. In the age of keyboards, spelling errors arise from imprecise finger movements more than anything else, meaning that spellchecks are not a creative crutch but a practical necessity. Beyond this, however, Grammarly’s utility begins to wear thin. Ross Pike of Koreti Ltd comments, ‘When it comes to writing professional copy, there are various levels of quality one can strive for. There is passable, there is good and there is truly engaging. Writing services may get you to the first or even second destinations, but they will not grant access to the third.’ For many, tools like Grammarly will suffice, but the do-it-yourself route should not be overlooked – it can make you a great writer, and more, a great communicator.
Author Bio
Theo Reilly – content writer at Quadrant2Design, is an independent writer and multilingual translator whose goal is to counteract stale writing in business blogs. Theo has particular interest in business and marketing-related matters surrounding the online world, web design, exhibitions and events.
