A Review of Grammarly Software

The process of editing my next novel, Rag & Muffin, is—mercifully—nearing its completion. To facilitate this process, I decided to shell out for a subscription to Grammarly Premium. I have just finished running the novel through it.

You’ve likely heard of Grammarly; due to heavy advertising, it’s a product that’s made itself widely known, deservedly or not, as a top choice among automated grammar checkers. Its reputation for accuracy may be undeserved and appears to have been artificially boosted by fake review blogs. Its most basic functions are free and can be added to popular browsers as a plug-in. However, a premium account, which runs at an outrageous price ($29.95 per month or $139.95 per year), is necessary to unlock is allegedly more advanced features.

Since Rag & Muffin is precious to me, I decided to shell out the money for a single month, download the Microsoft Word plugin, and see what I think of it.

Layout

For starters, its layout is great, and that may be its best feature. When you activate Grammarly, it opens a window in the right sidebar that makes suggestions as you type. That way, you can correct your document and look at the grammar-checker simultaneously. This is unlike Word’s built in grammar checker, which opens in a dialog box and forces a writer to move back and forth between the checker and the document.

Customization

Although its layout is wonderful, it doesn’t give the user much ability to alter its settings. You can select among several “genres” of writing, including Novel—which is of course what I used—and it allows you to toggle grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, and a few other options, but it does not allow for more granular customization. Particularly, I would prefer to be able to turn off its attempts to “correct” politically incorrect words. I don’t need a grammar checker wasting my time by telling me to find a different word whenever I write manhandle.

It also lacks the “ignore rule” feature that Microsoft Word has, so I had to put up with its attempts to correct me every time I deliberately used a British rather than American spelling, though it does at least distinguish between misspellings and “non-American variants.”

Features

The options are, as already mentioned, limited, but it does have unusual abilities worth noting. First, it gives you the option to send your manuscript to a human proofreader, though the pricing (thousands of dollars) is beyond the reach of most anybody. This looks like a way to get money from suckers, an attempt to convince the unpublished beginner that he can have a perfect, polished manuscript if he just forks over a pile of cash.

Second, it can check for plagiarism, which is a good feature as long as you limit yourself to plagiarizing from the internet because all Grammarly can do is hunt for similar passages on websites. The feature does seem to work, however, since it continually flagged me for plagiarism … and linked to my own blog.

Confident I’m not stealing from anybody, I simply turned the plagiarism detector off.

Accuracy

My biggest complaint is that Grammarly appears to ignore both passive voice and sentence fragments when it is on the “Novel” setting. Anyone who’s used Word’s built-in grammar checker knows that it is downright obsessive, to the point of lunacy, about eliminating passive voice. That can be annoying, but heeding it on occasion can result in tighter writing. Grammarly, by contrast, did not flag a single passive sentence in this novel, and I know that’s not because I never wrote any.

I’m less concerned about sentence fragments because I rarely produce one unintentionally, but it’s still odd. My guess is that Grammarly is trying to avoid flagging all the dialogue in a manuscript (and it does seem to handle dialogue unusually well), but that means it will miss one of the most common grammatical mistakes.

While it ignores these two common and fundamental problems, Grammarly obsesses over two other things: Vocabulary and commas.

Grammarly is constantly suggesting alternative words. Sometimes, the reason is clear: It can detect the same word in the previous sentence and recommend alternatives to vary the prose, though it cannot recognize parallelism. It also flags words it considers to be “often overused.” Its suggested alternatives demonstrate some attempt to understand the words’ context, though it is often wrong, with the results being sometimes hilarious—such as when it recommended I write “unconscious” instead of “dead.”

Most of the time, however, its reasons for recommending alternatives are opaque, and its suggestions are sometimes obnoxious. For example, I wrote that a character’s uniform was “saturated” (because she’d been in the rain), and Grammarly recommended I replace it with “full.” The recommendation had no obvious reason behind it and would have turned the sentence to gibberish.

I will say, however, that Grammarly has an extensive built-in vocabulary. This particular book is peppered with a slew of foreign words, and Grammarly recognized an unexpected number of them. What it couldn’t recognize, however, were unusual proper names, so whenever the characters Rags or Muffin were on the page, Grammarly informed me that all of my pronouns had “unclear antecedents.” This, however, is to be expected. That it checks for pronouns with unclear antecedents is itself significant.

The biggest issue, however, is commas. If you’ve used Microsoft Word’s grammar checker, you probably know that it is mostly worthless for detecting missing or misused commas, but Grammarly over-corrects for this, recommending commas anywhere and everywhere. Sometimes it’s right, of course, but it frequently isn’t. Comma rules in English confuse everybody, but a writer would have to know his comma rules very well and be very confident in his own  voice before he dared to use this software because he will otherwise end up with a manuscript so comma-filled as to be unreadable.

Conclusion

Grammarly claims to be the most accurate grammar checker. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but, like any other grammar checker, most of its suggestions are junk. You will have to wade through an enormous number of false hits and erroneous suggestions to find the few typos, overused words, and ungrammatical constructions it can actually catch.

That’s true of all grammar checkers, however, so I can’t really fault it for that. The perfect algorithm for understanding and correcting all the varied ways a man can construct a sentence has never been written and perhaps never will be.

The real question is whether it’s worth the money. It may or may not be more accurate than other grammar checkers, but it is different, especially in its obsession with varied word choice and its attempts to determine if all the pronouns have clear antecedents.

I did occasionally, maybe five times in a 100,000-word manuscript, accept its suggestions for alternate word choices. Once or twice, I threw a character’s name in if I thought Grammarly had a legitimate case for unclear antecedents.

So I can say I got something out of it, but did I get $29.95 worth? Hell no. It’s a perfectly fine grammar checker, but they need to drop the price considerably or allow you to buy it outright instead of subscribing to it before it will be worth it.

My advice is this: Grammar checkers are worth the time and trouble because they will catch typos or poor constructions that human proofreaders can miss. However, they always make more bad suggestions than good ones, no matter what brand you’re using.

You are probably just as well off with the grammar checker that’s already in your word-processing software as you are with Grammarly Premium. Don’t waste the money.