If We All Use Grammarly??

I am old enough to remember when spell check came into being and how revolutionary it seemed at the time. Now we have Grammarly sweeping into our lives making suggestions about everything we type on our computers and phones. It seems pretty amazing that AI is that smart, but what if it isn’t that smart? It got me thinking about the lowest common denominator of grammar. Is that how we want to communicate?

Grammarly and its AI most assuredly have changed how any person has communicated with others. It captures most spelling and grammar errors. But it also makes suggestions in sentence structure, tone, and word choices. I am not so sure that I am onboard with all that. I think that there is a lot we can lose. It can dumb down our writing to some Grammarly-determined level we should write at.

One of the bad things about Grammarly is that it scores you and implies you are wrong. You may be incorrect, but you may just as easily be correct in your English usage. I think we are all conditioned to want a perfect score so we accept the Grammarly corrections because “no errors” feels good. So many times we just whip through our document making all the suggested corrections by Grammarly. But what if “no errors” only means you accepted what they said? What if what you wrote was technically correct, just not the most common English usage?

My largest fear is that Grammarly will eliminate regional vernaculars of the English language. Having lived all over the US I find regional vernaculars full of local history. How it came to be and how the locals use it is part of their story. It is more than if you drink soda, pop, or Coke when ordering a soft drink. I don’t favor using local slang all the time. Sometimes you mean and you want to use y’all or yous guys. Then you should not any AI engine shame you out of it. Grammarly does exceptionally poorly at recognizing regional slang because it often uses words in a manner that might not follow the standard grammar or spelling rules. It insists you need to remove this type of slang, when it is exactly what you want to say. It is easier to allow the autocorrect to stay in place than retype what you really meant.

Another of the things I find Grammarly often gets wrong in complex sentences is the subject-verb agreement. No, I am not an English teacher or even someone who believes I am an English language nerd. I did have an exceptional English teacher in the 8th grade, and a good English teacher when I took a refresher in my 40’s when I wanted to do some creative writing. I do keep my Diana Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference handy when I am doing creative writing. If Grammarly disagrees with a sentence, and I am fairly sure I am right I look it up. If it is technically correct, I keep it. As a result of my bullheadedness Grammarly scores me quite poorly in some areas while I am exceptional in others. It tells me that I am more accurate than only 29% of the users, but that I use 81% more unique words. That seems an oxymoron to me. I suspect that this is a result of choosing to stay with what I type when it is not wrong, but may not fit into the structured AI mold of Grammarly. I don’t want to dumb down, homogenize my English, hide my regional dialect, or streamline my writing if the detailed picture I want to paint takes all those words in just that fashion to convey my message.

I am sure that this rant has resulted in some of you thinking I need to get a life. Others of you may be cheering me on because you have faced this same hurdle. I just want each of you to think the next time any AI grammar tool tells you what to say, “Is what I wrote what I want to say?” If so let it ride. Be the smart person you are and teach the AI engines of the world a thing or two.

P.S. In case you wonder I ignored Grammerly five times in this post: three spelling errors that the Merriam-Webster dictionary confirms are correct first-choice spellings, one subject-verb agreement that is correct, and a comma placement that is correct.