Grammarly can jump off a cliff Pt 1.
(This is Part 1, because I didn’t realise just how many atrocious Grammarly adverts there are. It will be ongoing, until they either collapse and die or take over the world. My money is on the latter).
Initially, the title ended “…off and die”, but I need to remain professional. As demonstrated by the professional nature of all the other writing so far on this blog.
Grammarly, and to a lesser extent, apps like like Hemingway, not only immensely annoy me, but are an example of everything destroying culture and writing as we know it. No, that’s not an exaggeration. How dare you.
I’ve heard it described as just an improvement to spell-check, but it’s creating a dull, emotionless void of corporate text. I’ve voiced this opinion and been accused of being mean to people who can’t write well — of somehow looking down on people who need help with their writing or have English as a second or third language, and want to use technology to make their writing better, or easier. I think of it as similar to anorexic teenage girls taking laxatives to try to lose more weight. It’s unhealthy, it doesn’t help in the long term, it helps to maintain a societal expectation that’s maybe unnecessary, and there’s probably nothing wrong with you in the first place.
You develop a writing style, not just by learning which specific rules to follow, but by practising writing and by reading more. Some people’s first attempts at writing in their own voice come from academic essays — but Grammarly wants them to all follow the same pattern. People want to make careers in writing, but Grammarly comes along and tells you it’ll manage your personal writing as well as your writing for business. Every company wants to demonstrate its unique identity, and Grammarly wants you to all do that in the same way. This seems contradictory.
What’s worse, even Grammarly’s own advertising seems to suggest this one-size-fits-all approach is beneficial, while at the same time giving examples of why, to me, they don’t know how to write for shit. I know the word ‘Orwellian’ is rather overused at the moment, but if you control the language that people use, you control how they think. On the basis of what’s in their adverts, Grammarly would rather you didn’t think at all.
Let’s look at what Grammarly is aiming to do, in its own words.
Here’s a great start — the pre-video ad that I get on YouTube before watching a compilation of Grammarly Ads is…a Grammarly ad! Why are you paying money to advertise to customers who are already in your shop?
The voice over describes it as a ‘digital writing assistant’. Headline — “Great Writing, Simplified”. So, unnecessary capitalisation of simplified and no full stop at the end? I guess that’s a design choice. Isn’t it great that we can all make individual choices as to how we’d like to design a page?
Does great writing necessarily have to be simplified? I’m being slightly facetious, but I disagree with this idea that great writing must always be simple. It explains how to ‘Compose bold, clear, mistake-free writing’. Why three adjectives? Because comms says three sounds better, of course. If your writing is clear, doesn’t that mean by definition that it’s free of mistakes? Do you want your writing to be clear? Or, for that matter, bold? These are choices that you need to make when writing. For example, right now, I’m choosing to sound like a pedantic arsehole.
Then a shot of Grammarly’s Tone Detector. Again, three different variables, because us proles can’t handle anything more complex than that. If sending out a mass-firing email, you need to make sure you come across as optimistic as well as formal. I find this approach that we all need to keep our language in pre-determined business-friendly formats really depressing. We try to teach people how to communicate and develop a personality, and then scrub any evidence of that personality from them. The voice over explains that with ‘Grammarly Premium’ you get even more insight. So, a two-tier system with more for those who can afford it. A famously great way of assisting equality.
It also talks of “sentence-structure corrections” and “conciseness corrections”. Do you always need to be concise? If you want to be clear, is a phrase like “sentence-structure corrections” better than “corrections to your sentence structure”? I’d argue no.
Leaving the uncertain grammar of that tagline to one side, what part of these images has suggested that Grammarly is interested in ‘your voice’? Correcting it to fit into some existing template would seem to do the opposite, to me.
Let’s ignore that you really shouldn’t be interrupting your free time to send this email, and the fact that she seems to be forwarding the contract and committing to work without reading it, and that she’s jumping into the first episode rather quickly — I just typed this sentence into a Google doc, and Google picked up the error. If you’re not seeing the difference between Contact and Contract in a 21 word email, I don’t think you have the attention to detail needed to make a podcast. Also, if you’re trying to remain formal enough with Isha that you’re worried about her noticing a typo, maybe try paragraphs?
So this is for a podcast, but you’re sending listeners the script,and also announcing that you’re on a brand new channel, and talking about the guests. It’s a lot of information — if you’re talking about all of that, maybe it should be more spread out, and I’d certainly give it a better title. Maybe include the title of the podcast for one thing. Fundamentally though, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that sentence. What does Grammarly suggest changing it to?
Obviously it’s terrible — you’ve taken what little personality was in the first version (admittedly a little ‘Live Laugh Love’ for my tastes, but fine) and completely erased it. No human being every tells you that they are “proud to announce” anything other than the birth of their first grandchild. “Listeners, we missed you” really gets to the heart of the relationship this host must have with their audience. In it’s place, blah.
What’s worse is that you’re actually removing useful information. The first version told me you had incredible guests — really? Cool! I’m already a listener of this show seeing as you’re emailing me, so I’m really intrigued to know who these hosts (who I’ve already developed a parasocial relationship with after listening to them for two seasons) have got in-store for future chats!
The second version — “It’s better than ever before”. Is it? Maybe I’ll be the judge of that thank you very much. No mention of the new channel, no fixing of the awful email title. I don’t think that’s better. It’s verbal packaging — the polystyrene pellets that you move out of the way in order to get to what you actually want. It’s making the email content meaningless. Just send me the script pdf ffs.
What’s next?
So, to begin, this looks like Slack. We’ve started “Hi Ben!” which implies that this is either an introductory message, or she’s replying to an initial inquiry. Then she dives straight in to demands. No “We’ve just had a meeting and these were the findings”, No “thanks for agreeing to work on the theme music”, just straight in. Obviously ‘cool yet curious’ is pretty useless as a guide — no suggestions for instrumentation or tempo? No discussion of length? — but maybe she’s linking below to a mood board or Spotify playlist or something. Let’s see what Grammarly suggests.
So again, doesn’t look at any of the issues above. Fine. BUT CALM AND COOL ARE NOT SYNONYMS. A glass of ice water is not ‘calm to the touch’ on a hot day. Prince was not the calmest musician to ever grace a stage. Musically, I’d get very, VERY different ideas from ‘cool yet curious’ than I would to ‘calm yet curious’.
“Cool yet curious” would make me think “outwardly standoffish, but open to being persuaded with the right words”. A bouncer waiting to hear your story as to why your clearly under-18 brother should definitely be allowed in to the Over 18’s nightclub. Audrey Horne looking at the new guests in the lobby of the Great Northern Hotel, deciding whether she wants to cause trouble or not. I’m hearing Billie Holiday singing from a shadowy corner of an unlit stage. I’m hearing Link Wray guitars, beats so slow they’re barely hanging onto the groove. I’m hearing Bohren Und Der Club of Gore with slightly more chord changes.
“Calm yet curious” makes me think of a large animal coming across a small one, or vice versa. Bambi meeting his first butterfly. A couple, lying down in a meadow fresh from frolicking, seeing a tiny caterpillar crawling up a dandelion stem and wondering if he’ll get to the top. Definitely something pastoral — maybe Ramblin’ Man by Lemon Jelly or Reynardine by Fairport Convention.
This is not helping you to convey your voice. It’s making a decision for you — and to be honest, any actual musician is going to read either of those and think “oh, right, you’ve got no idea then”.
This is presented as trying to help, but does it? Would it not result in you spending 30 mins fretting over whether your text was friendly or confident enough? If there’s a way to ask for a raise that gets you 5/5 across the board, would you not already have found it? When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric.
Let’s move on to the next ad, where Nadia and a nameless stock image guy are working together on a Postgrad community project. Postgrads! They’ll definitely know how to write clear, communicative language, right?
Sure, ‘Good’ isn’t helpful without understanding what the requirements are. ‘Promising’ implies it could work, with a bit of effort, but isn’t that already conveyed by ‘potential’? ‘Excellent’ just means ‘good’ but better, so that’s not clearer language, just more excitable.
He goes for ‘a promising potential site’, and the alliteration would put me off a little, but hey, you do you generic stock imagery guy.
Again, Google docs caught this, so Grammarly isn’t offering much. I suppose some people might get these two confused, but this is the kind of thing you should know if you’re writing for a living. You’ve just boasted about completing a degree in public policy and you can’t write? I thought a public policy graduate would have learned the basics of how to write sentences that people can understand. It’s not like your degree was in Physiotherapy — it’s public policy! You are reading and writing policy documents, you should know the difference between before and after.
Also, introductory email with an exclamation mark? Dropping your degree rather than your reason for involvement in the project? No details of what this community outreach would involve before asking some stranger to sign up to a random green space project? You haven’t even put ‘No worries if not!!!’ at the end? Nadia, you’re a monster.
So Grammarly has detected plagiarism. A bit obvious I’d say, seeing as nobody would actually write like that unless forced to. It’s also hugely stating the obvious — people with a public place to meet tend to care more about their neighbourhood, because otherwise they have no neighbours, just people who live next door. But why are you telling Generic Stock Image Guy this? He wrote the damn thing, he knows it’s plagiarised! Are you going to rephrase it for him so he can pass TurnItIn? For a grant proposal?
No. It shows you that 5% of your text matches the source (without any indication of how to reduce this) and then copies to the clipboard. Doesn’t add it as a properly formatted reference to the end of the paragraph, doesn’t put it as a hyperlink, doesn’t add it to the end of the document. At worst, this is just improper formatting. If you’re going to hint to students that you can help them avoid plagiarism detection with this software, you need to be clearer than that. And also, fuck you. Universities have to pay enough to TurnItIn as it is without you helping them to circumvent it.
OK, yes, ‘that our community is in need of’ is a bit clunky, but would anyone write like that? I’ve never seen that, and I’ve seen some hacked together grant applications. I would also argue that ‘space that our community is so desperately in need of’ would far better convey the importance of this park. Hey, what do I know.
This is the same plagiarised paragraph from earlier. No changes, no referencing, not even a superscript for a footnote, and now it gets 100%. “Correctness” — which is an AWFUL word to use, just because someone told them they need to avoid negativity so they can’t say ‘mistakes’ — is fine as I suppose there are no spelling mistakes. Clarity — is it clear? 5 lines without a comma? This almost feels like it wants to be bullet points. Engaging? No sentence that starts with ‘Studies show’ has ever been engaging to me. It tells me you’re either filling space, or about to mistake specifics for general information. Delivery? It reads like I’m being given a presentation on effective grout replacement. It’s a grant proposal, I know it’s SUPPOSED to be boring and factual, but why not start with why you want the damn thing to happen?
So this document has the 100% score from earlier, but only gets a Readability rating of 85? Is that out of 100? Who knows! I’m sure the AI is incredibly good at working out what people have said they find easy to read, but some people are stupid. This is a grant proposal, right? Maybe some readability needs to be sacrificed for precision? Who are you to say what they really want?
Just send it. Just send it FFS. It’s a congratulatory message between you and your community co-worker. It doesn’t need to be signed off by the app. You used to have confidence in yourself, now you won’t do anything unless the app gives you permission to do it first. What would go wrong? “Oh, I accidentally slipped and wrote ‘you’re a horrible vindictive micromanager and I can’t wait to see the back of you’ when I meant to write ‘Well done!’”.
Is nobody else terrified by this? Does nobody else get a real “my partner is a violent psycho and they’ll kill me if they find anything from you on my phone” vibes? HONESTLY GRAMMARLY SHE’S JUST A WORK COLLEAGUE NO NOT THE BELT.
On to the next advert. We’re moving away from friendly community projects into the corporate world. Brace yourself.
OK, Affect/Effect is an easy mistake to make, and people do it. As we’re about to see, it appears James also uses Grammarly, so the app is controlling both sides of this discussion. I’m getting the vibe that James is the boss, so this message has a rather sycophantic vibe to me. “You did so well James, everyone is going to love you and name their first child after you!”.
So now we see that James relies on Myra to check his text for him. But Myra can’t tell the difference between effect and affect, so what the hell does she know? And if James is already paying Grammarly to check his text, then what does he need her for? Add your own punchline to that and then work out how offended you are by either me or the advert.
What change does Grammarly suggest? Re-write Myra’s contract?
Now again, I assume he meant ‘The move to the new office is important’. The move is important, so can you check the wording on the message I’m about to send out. OK.
I do like that it tells you what the problem is, but if this is being used by people with language difficulties, are they going to know what an antecedent is? Would ‘Unclear’ not suffice if you’re aiming to be more concise? Or are complicated words sometimes needed to convey meaning? (insert ‘pretends to be shocked’ gif)
So Grammarly has added words, because being concise doesn’t matter any more. But he’s made it clear that the announcement is important. Oh good. I was worried for a second you meant the move…you know, your employees’ emotional state, the number of them you’ve had to fire to afford the new building, all that…I’m glad to hear it’s just the announcement that’s so important you’ve asked an app to check it for you first.
Again, it’s bland corporate-speak nonsense, nobody expected any different. But look again — the delivery is just right! But the engagement is a bit bland. So…the perfect delivery is a bit bland? Yes there’s a double ‘the’ in the second paragraph, but I wouldn’t say the underlined ‘and’ or ‘myself’ were wrong necessarily, and if they are there are plenty of other choices they could have changed. I don’t see why the ‘We are excited to be implementing’ section needs changing for clarity, but ‘help us stay connected to our purpose and facilitate collaboration’ gets a pass. Is it because it mentions ‘the unique needs of each of our staff members’ and Grammarly doesn’t like the idea of people being different?
OK, yes this is just a typo, and literally any text software would pick it up, but it’s worth it for this.
I mean come on, someone earned themselves an extra gram over the weekend for that image, right? Fridayg? Fried Egg? Genius.
I’m going through these on an advert compilation, and we’ve just hit a campaign change. I’ll come back with a part 2 on those. I fear things will not improve.
Are you a Grammarly user who is offended by my approach? Am I missing something, and asking an AI to write for you is actually going to be a good thing, rather than eventually putting copywriters out of work? Email me your complaints at commsruinseverything@gmail.com and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong.
