In short, you have to be confident about what you ignore from Grammarly. It's better at catching dumb mistakes than making something shine.
Technology's Understanding of Language
When I first learned about Grammarly, I got in touch with a computational linguist who works there, Mariana Romanyshyn. We talked by video conference back in 2016 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 sometimes makes incorrect suggestions and misses errors 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," Romanyshyn said. Machines will always assume that "man" is a noun in this context. Another example of a sentence that always tricks computers is one well known to linguists: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." It is a grammatically correct sentence. Please puzzle over it for a moment before reading about how to parse it.
As far as privacy goes, be careful what you feed into Grammarly, as the company could conceivably see everything it analyzes. PCMag reviewer Ben Moore addresses this topic in detail in his review of Grammarly.
Grammarly Makes (Bad) Writing Better
Since my first experience with the app, I've used it for a few writing assignments when an editor required that I submit a Grammarly report alongside my copy. Another writing team I worked with gave all its writers a hearty nudge to use the app to catch and correct the kinds of writing faux pas that made one cranky editor crankier.
When I'm on a deadline and have only written the first draft, Grammarly does the boring work of finding and bringing to my attention errors, typos, and needless repetition. It's a handy productivity hack. As I mentioned earlier, though, the suggestions are only beneficial when I can confidently throw away the bad ones.
Grammarly isn't cheap, either. The free version is limited, and Premium plans cost $30 per month, $60 per quarter, or $144 per year. But when you're on deadline with an important piece of writing that you know could be better, it may be money well spent.
Many people need help with their writing, sometimes in high-stakes scenarios. Job seekers working on cover letters only get one chance to make a first impression. Students may find that bad writing makes the difference between passing and failing. And business professionals putting together presentations that make or break their quarter can always use some help. Practically everyone has a vested interest in writing as clearly and as well as they can, and Grammarly can help, if you know enough to take its best suggestions and discard its worst.
