To Grammarly or Not To Grammarle…
So, is that a question?
I am jumping my photographic rails because I have had a love/hate relationship with Grammarly for years. Lately, I have picked up on what seems to be a trend to beat down on Grammarly. A perusal of Medium’s stories on the subject appears to run about 2:1 against. But I use it, and I think I have figured out why it works for me. Just me. If it doesn’t work for you I get it. I am not trying to sell you, just relating my own disparate experience. (Full disclosure: I currently subscribe to the “Pro” version so you must listen to me as I am a certified Grammarly Pro.)
It all started one dark and stormy because I can’t type. Well, I use all ten fingers and an occasional nose, but I never learned to type by touch the way all real writers can. Originally I could not type at all beyond the two-finger-hunt-and-peck-for-the-letter classic version.
(Say! Did you know that the accursed QWERTY keyboard was developed to slow typists down?! The girls (always girls then) were crashing their typebars into strangled spaghetti by typing too fast! Really! You could look it up!)
I did not have that problem.
In school, I developed my own not-quite useless system of using nine fingers plus right thumb (got a tip on that spacebar trick) while looking at the keys. Always. I could never lry m z to tj paper r jibersish.
It was decreed that I was not infantry material in the army, but I seemed to know some English and could “type” (stop laughing) so they sent me to clerk-typists school to learn the Army Way to touch type. The Army Way’s first mistake was training us on machines that still had the letters on the keycaps. I cheated (of course) and never learned, yet there I was, a real company clerk typing typing typing all day long, using my personal it-sort-of-works “system.” I ordered whiteout by the quart.
Hey! Ya buried the lede!
Yes, yes, I did. Fast forward fifty-odd years and we are all doing more typing than ever, but I still can’t exactly touch type. And it’s driving me nuts. I want to be able to type as fast as I think. I am sure I needn’t tell you that isn’t even a goal if you have to look at the keys, so I tried a couple of CDs (yeh, that old) to learn about the home keys and do some unutterably boring drills and conclude that I cannot stand this beyond-stultifying dreck so I, as usual, developed my own “system” which hopefully sort-of works.
And (you saw this coming, didn’t you) my “system” was heavily reliant on Grammarly — plus autocorrect.
Stephanie Thurrott writes, “I type as fast as I can, especially in my first drafts, so I can capture all of my ideas. With Grammarly, when I make a mistake I don’t have to slow down and backtrack. Grammarly takes care of it, with a quick little underline so I notice the fix. If the correction isn’t what I meant, I can hop back and fix it myself, but Grammarly is almost always right. It knows what I meant to type.”
I could have written that. Not precisely that — I have some quibbles, but basically, I am as close to writing nirvana as I will ever get at my great age, and it makes it possible for me to express myself understandably. I hope.
I have reached a stage where I can actually drag my eyes away from the keycaps and watch the words scramble across the screen. Dribble across? Crawl? Make short, purposeful dashes to find cover?
So, if Grammarly works for me, why, and why maybe doesn’t it for you?
Sheer unadulterated good luck.
I have tiny talent in most areas. I’m a decent photographer, but this isn’t that. I was gifted a gift about age four-ish when I discovered I could read (Baaadum tssshhh). I wanted someone to read me a story, but everyone was busy, so I essayed to read it myself — and dang, I could!
Maybe it was a story I already knew from sitting in a lap looking at the pictures and the words and how they were formed, but whatever it was, I was able to read the words, make the sounds, sound things out. It was a wonderful gift.
I skipped kindergarten because I had to have surgery. When I entered first grade I was already reading at maybe a third-grade level. Dick? Jane? Spot the Wonder Dog f’cryin’ out loud? What IS this dreck? I want to read Paradise Lost.
I had a lucky gift for language, specifically American English. I was pretty terrible at everything else (math? Don’t go there), but I could read and write. I couldn’t learn the multiplication tables, but I could spell sphygmomanometer and use it in a sentence. Ooo-kay, not at age six but still…
I think Grammarly is a help to me because I can authoritatively and even ruthlessly ignore it. If I know that what I wrote was what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, I can punch that algorithm right in the nose with total confidence that I am right and it is wrong and neener neener so there.
If it wants me to plant extra commas by the roadside, I can say no; they spoil the view when they are grown.
Don’t like my spellings? Ya mudda wears combat boots! (Not the insult it once was since mom may very well wear combat boots and thank you for your service).
I originally used the basic free version but was urged (!!) to try the subscription. At that time (long ago), I hated it from the start, with nannybots pick-pick-picking at everything and not letting me be me. I demanded my money back. They said they didn’t normally do that. The conversation became heated. They refunded me and suggested I stay away from them or they’d get a restraining order.
So I kept using the freebie, but the Big Things I needed, like really dead-accurate spell checking and autocorrecting, were just not advanced enough. The restraining order having expired, I subscribed again, briefly, and yeah, more dissension and another refund and probably banning for life.
This year, for reasons not well understood (maybe they offered a trial so they didn’t have to refund if I despised it?) I did it again, and dang me; I am pleased with it. Today’s nannybots give me total freedom to be a grammatical yutz. “We make suggestions, not commands,” the nannybots say through those sharky smiles that never reach the eyes, but they do not interfere. For example, they want a space between nanny and bots, but they let me get away with my own made-up word. The old nannybots were pretty rigid about it, and they wore wimples and carried rulers.
The reason I think it works for me is that I know what I am doing.
I am and always have been an excellent speller. I know if they substitute a wrong word because I know English and I can spell. But what if I couldn’t? I can get away with being my own proofreader; some can, some can’t.
No question, Grammarly can and even probably is a disaster for one who lacks facility with English. I can just imagine what a nightmare Grammarly can create for ESL folks. We all know that English is a tough language to learn in the first place, then Grammarly cheerfully gets it wrong but you can’t tell.
If Grammarly is not helping, you shouldn’t use it, but you have to know that it’s not helping, so what do you do when you don’t? Catch 22.
For those who struggle, I hear you, I empathize, I sympathize, and I haven’t the foggiest notion what to tell you except maybe indeed you should stay far away from Grammarly. If you blindly rely on it, it will mess up everything you write because it is not Artificial Intelligence (we’re not there yet). It screws up and it does not know it, and if you don’t know it either, welp, there’s your problem.
I rely on Grammarly plus autocorrect to cover my butt, but (!) I always reread my drafts frequently to catch Grammarly’s errors and my errors that they didn’t catch. I run a full Grammarly check every so often, too. One thing I like is that they sometimes rewrite a sentence for me that works way better than the way I wrote it — unless they are full of it when I can gigglingly ignore them as they look disapprovingly down their noses.
Ssssst — “they” are not real…
Shaddup! I know! ‘S’a metaphor, dummy.
So I won’t trash Grammarly, but I truly get those who do. Most of the cons written about it are by people who know what they are doing and doing what I just did, warning you not to gimp along with only Grammarly as your companion because it will walk you off a cliff. Grammarly is no more artificially intelligent than you are. You can learn things.
Did I even manage to answer my own premise? Yeah, well…
Thanks for reading. Yes, I ramble. My late bride would cry.
Some References:
6 Ways I was Wrong About Grammarly
