I hate Grammarly and so should you

The case for learning and doing it yourself

I was forced this week to download Grammarly, the “cloud-based typing assistant” that looks over your writing as you’re doing it and makes suggestions. You’ve probably seen the YouTube commercials for it. You write something and the program fixes it to make it prettier, like:

“It is my belief that we should consider how important it is to It’s important to…”

Basically it analyzes your writing for clumsy or dumb rhetorical conventions and tries to make you say something not so dumb. A professional request obliged me to install it on my computer or else I would not have done so. It’s a profoundly irritating program that’s always hovering in the margins of whatever I’m writing. I’ve got to figure out how to delete it. (Literally: I need to figure out how to get it off my computer. Years ago it was really easy to delete stuff from a computer. Now it’s almost impossible. Technology has really backslid over the past few decades.)

Grammarly is a bad style of program. It purports to help you improve your writing skills but of course it doesn’t. Writing assistants improve your writing skills in the same way that, say, a package of Maruchan Ramen improves your cooking skills. If someone else is doing everything for you then you yourself are not really doing it and you’re just not getting any sort of practical instruction. You’re just outsourcing the necessary workaday critical thinking skills to a robot and not actually building up the necessary intellectual capital to master it.

You might argue that Grammarly isn’t actually bad insofar as it’s simply performing the functions normally provided by, say, an editor, or a proofreader. I think this is wrong in a subtle but important way. When you write a report or an essay and hand it over to your editor, he will—at least if he’s a good editor—provide you with a revised draft outlining all of the changes he made. If you’re new and inexperienced your draft will have a lot of markups. You will be able to see the changes that were made in a visceral and impactful way. It will imprint upon you the necessity of improving your writing, of making it leaner and more preemptively responsive to the desires of your editor (and more importantly a wide audience). Even if your editor doesn’t give you a marked-up copy for review, you’ll still likely be able to at least tell the difference between the thing you handed in and the thing that made it to print. This will help you become a better writer. It’s part of the process.

A thing like Grammarly doesn’t do this. Instead it fixes your mistakes on the go. You’re never exposed to the full breadth of your mangled style. Every time you write something poorly or incompetently, the program comes in behind you, like a silent janitor at a library, sweeping up your errors without you really being aware of them. You finish each project with a pristine piece of copy, written as if it was formed that way, none of the repairs informing your education as a writer at all. It’s the difference between having your family critique your meals while they’re eating them and having a professional chef silently tweaking the levels of salt and tomato paste in your sauce as you’re making it. The one gives you actual feedback; the other preempts feedback and shields you from the necessary difficulties of growth needed for real improvement.

We actually have a lengthy real-world experiment to demonstrate a similar principle: Spell check. A few generations of both professional and personal writers have now been raised with computers constantly checking and correcting their spelling. Do you think this has improved spelling overall among all writers? Of course not. Repeated surveys have demonstrated that writers at all levels are quite bad at spelling. A BBC report from 2012 showed that more than 30% of respondents couldn’t spell “definitely” and more than 60% couldn’t spell “necessary.” How much do you think that has improved in the intervening decade, when huge portions of communication have shifted to smartphones that relentlessly correct minor and major spelling mistakes? Take that away and you’ll likely find most people greatly struggling to spell many words beyond even one syllable. This is what happens.

These kinds of programs do not do you any good. They are not meant to be used briefly, the sort of thing you disable after a learning period. Few products are designed with a sunset clause in mind. You are meant to use a program like Grammarly indefinitely. And its indefinite use lessens you as a writer, which is—as least as far as a writer is concerned—most assuredly a bad thing.