Grammarly is one of the most popular writing assistant programs on the internet, but it’s not without its flaws. For me, the flaws have started outweighing the benefits to the point where I can’t recommend it anymore.
1
It Takes the Personality Out of Your Writing
Grammarly’s grammar suggestions are often helpful. However, it suggests changing sentences to the point where grammatical accuracy takes the personality out of the write-up. The worst part is that your sentence or paragraph might not even be wrong, but Grammarly will try to improve it to the extent that your writing loses touch with your style.
English is often a confusing language to write in. There are hundreds of rules a writer needs to abide by for a piece of text to be considered grammatically accurate. But depending on the writer’s style and region, Grammarly might deem something inaccurate and will suggest a change when it’s really just written in a specific style.
2
It May Not Work Where You Want
Another big problem with Grammarly is that it might not play well with the platform you’re using. Want to write an article on WordPress? You have about a 50-50 chance that Grammarly will detect the text box.
This is mostly a case of hard refreshing a page to fix the issue. However, unless you remember to save your draft before refreshing the page, you run the risk of losing your progress. Finding out that Grammarly isn’t detecting your text, and then refreshing the page to start again or fixing something you’ve already written, hampers the flow and can knock you out of your mindset.
It’s a huge productivity killer anytime it happens.
For a tool that aims to assist your writing anywhere on the internet or your devices, this is a glaring issue that should’ve been fixed in the 16 years Grammarly has been around.
3
The Corrections Are Extremely Buggy
Even when Grammarly works as intended, the corrections can be extremely glitchy. For the last six months, I’ve been facing an issue where suggested commas are inserted either one character before or after their intended place. Sometimes, the suggestion doesn’t work at all; other times, it completely messes up my text.
If you’re not sharp enough to catch this when it happens, you could end up with copy that’s’ riddled with typos and incorrect commas. Even if you catch it in time, it takes unnecessary clicks to fix the typo and put the comma in the right place before moving on.
This is just one instance of Grammarly bugging out in the browser. Unfortunately, the problem carries through in the desktop app as well. In my experience, more than half of Grammarly’s suggestions get incorrectly placed when used.
To be clear, the corrections themselves aren’t wrong; their placement is. Constantly backtracking and fixing random letters, spaces, and punctuation makes writing a hassle. If you’re writing for work, it kills productivity and forces you to spend more time fixing mistakes Grammarly makes than the other way around. At this point, I’d rather use Google to check my grammar than rely on Grammarly.
4
Suggestions Always Push for a Paid Plan
If you’re on Grammarly’s free plan, you get three premium suggestions every day, after which Grammarly starts asking you to subscribe to its paid tiers. There’s nothing wrong with that; I understand having to pay for more suggestions and features.
But it seems like outside of basic spelling and grammar, almost every suggestion Grammarly makes is to push you into subscribing to a paid plan. I often end up with documents littered with differently-colored lines and improvements from Grammarly, all hiding behind a paid plan. What’s even worse is that you can’t hide them from showing up, so you end up looking at text with colorful underlines from Grammarly second-guessing what you did wrong.
This problem is compounded by the buggy corrections and the fact that the changes suggested by Grammarly may not even be required. For free users, this is a one-way ticket to second-guessing your entire copy and trying to figure out small issues when you really should be focusing on the overall structure and flow. These unnecessary tactics make even the basic Microsoft Editor better compared to Grammarly.
5
Your Writing May Be Training Grammarly’s AI
Grammarly uses what you write to train its AI systems. Thankfully, the company doesn’t just grab everything you write. Your text goes through a sampling process where random snippets of text are picked and stripped of any personal identifiers before being sent off to its algorithms.
Grammarly claims the practice helps it train and improve its AI and machine learning models, plus contributes to general research to help improve the product for everyone. However, there’s no way of knowing for sure what snippets of your writing are picked, how well they’re stripped of personal information, and how Grammarly ends up using them. You just have to take their word for it.
As is the case with most tools that collect your data, Grammarly enables this feature by default. Unless your account originates from the EU, UK, Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein, or Switzerland, your data gets sent off to Grammarly from the moment you start using it.
Disabling this feature is a simple matter of heading to your Grammarly account’s privacy settings and disabling the Product Improvement and Training toggle (you will be asked for confirmation). That said, Grammarly claims it “may still collect non-content data, such as writing statistics (total words written, types of suggestions accepted, mistakes made, etc.), and may use that data for product improvement and training.”
Grammarly used to be a great tool, especially when I first started using it in 2018. However, since then, the tool has deteriorated significantly in almost all aspects. If you’ve been struggling with Grammarly as well, it’s time to start looking for alternatives. Microsoft Word can help you proofread faster with the right settings, for instance.
