Do you use Grammarly to help with your written content? Discover why using Grammarly is a bad idea and the problems it can cause.
No matter how good your writing skills are, it’s always useful to have a second pair of eyes check over your work. And if that second pair of eyes happens to be an expert in grammar and spelling then even better, right?
Enter Grammarly… the online tool that’s been designed to spot errors and poorly written content, offering corrections for each.
However, although it may sound like a lifesaver, it’s not such a perfect solution as you may be hoping for. Here’s a quick run-through of some of the issues with Grammarly and why it isn’t the answer.
Active and passive voice
Every writer knows that it’s not ideal to write extensively in the passive tense, but that it is sometimes necessary depending on what you’re trying to convey.
Grammarly adopts an evangelical approach against the passive tense, highlighting it and suggesting a correction in every case. This would be less problematic if the correction could be adopted, but in many cases, it fundamentally changes the meaning of the content.
For example, “the van was parked by the factory” may be passive but it’s necessary in this case. Grammarly suggests that this is altered to “the factory parked the van” – which is clearly wrong.
The strict and unrelenting use of active voice is just one of the issues identified with using Grammarly. It applies other types of grammatical rules in the same inflexible way, such as starting a sentence with a conjunction (which is fine in many circumstances despite what your English teacher may have said).
The idea of using Grammarly is to improve your content but you simply can’t rely on the suggestions it provides.
Privacy
Grammarly can be used either as a browser extension or as a standalone app but whichever you use, there are significant concerns over privacy.
It’s important to highlight that Grammarly certainly appears to be a company that takes privacy seriously and has basic protocols in place. However, looking more closely at the small print and their processes, may cause significant concerns.
The browser extension captures keystrokes, so you’ll want to make sure that it’s switched off for any sites where you’re entering sensitive data. Although Grammarly won’t abuse this information, its own security policy admits that “internet data transmissions cannot be guaranteed to be 100% secure…and we cannot guarantee the safety of the information you transmit to us”.
However, even with Grammarly switched off for sensitive websites, whether you’re using the extension or the standalone app, your data will be stored.
Their privacy statement confirms that they will collect “all text, documents, or other content or information uploaded, entered, or otherwise transmitted by you”. Grammarly provides a long list of potential uses for the information it collects including marketing, research and statistical analysis. It may also provide the data to third parties for complementary services, where needed.
Everything you need to know is clearly stated in their privacy policy, but the question you’ll need to ask yourself is whether you’re happy with this level of data being collected and retained for an unspecified period?
Question marks
The lack of real intelligence in its technology means that Grammarly can only be used to identify errors that you’ve accidentally missed during a proofread; it’s no good for highlighting problems you weren’t aware of. As its suggestions are unreliable and it often highlights legitimate text as incorrect, the best use is simply as a check, not a learning tool.
Of course, that is only providing you are happy to overlook the collection of your data and content and the lack of any guarantees over security.
For many users, this combination of concerns means that Grammarly simply isn’t a tool worth taking a chance on.