5 Reasons ‘Grammarly’ Should Be a Supplementary, Not Primary, Tool for Writing Instruction
This school year has started like no other. Due to COVID-19, our district has started the year with remote learning, which has presented both challenges and new opportunities. One of the biggest opportunities presented has been the use of a multitude of digital tools to help students to learn on their own. Despite the wonderful way that the tech enables us, as teachers, to empower students to learn on their own, I believe that the heart of writing instruction should still come from a real teacher.
Let’s keep human-led writing instruction as the main course, and the digital tools can serve as side dishes. Here’s why you can’t just eat dessert.
1. Spellcheck doesn’t catch everything.
Grammarly is a great tool to catch some spelling errors. However, sometimes, it doesn’t recognize what you are going for as a writer. Think about our current world. Phrases that we would never have even thought of a few months ago have now become part of our normal vocabulary. Grammarly hasn’t caught up on our new lingo, though, and often marks these as errors.
2. Students need content instruction, too.
Although Grammarly provides some hints on why the error is an error, students need much more direct content instruction. They need to know how to formulate a claim, and an arguable one at that. Although Grammarly can tell students that they need to use active voice, it won’t necessarily always realize that “Dogs are animals” is not an arguable point.
3. Fixing the “little red line” becomes clickbait.
Students love getting to the finish line, completing the circle, and checking boxes. Let’s be real, most teachers do too (we love our checklists)! The little red lines that Grammarly uses to mark errors often become things that students simply click on to clear. A clean page is a success, whether that error was actually an error or not.
4. Context is key.
Grammarly can easily add in a comma for students, but it can’t necessarily tell what they meant to say. Some “errors” are by design. We are taught that student voice is important. In fact, it might be the most important thing to consider in our classrooms. When we erase that voice by allowing digital tools to force students to conform to one way of writing, we are entering dangerous territory as educators and adults who are supposed to shape, encourage but never diminish, a student’s creativity.
5. Algorithms can fail.
No tool should ever be the end-all, be-all. We are living this reality: technology can, and will, fail us. Slow wifi, zoom-bombing, and dropped video calls have become commonplace obstacles in our current climate. Asynchronous learning has allowed us to introduce so many digital tools that give students the opportunity to learn on their own. However, what if that tool fails? What if it drops the ball? Sure, humans drop the ball too, but they can bounce back in a way that an algorithm cannot.
I am the first person to tell you that the current online-learning situation has forced us to consider ways in which we can reimagine our world, especially education. That being said, relying on digital tools as the sole means of instruction is not ideal for true student learning. With remote learning, we are seeing an increase in reliance on digital tools to serve student content. However, we must remember that those tools need to remain as supplementary desserts, not the primary course.
