So I first want to confess that I am a user of Grammarly. My own grammar and spelling is not great, yet I also find it to be incredibly distracting while I write. I find that it doe not always understand my prose and it will read something as "problematic" when it is meant to be poetic. So while I find it useful for cleaning up silly errors, I find that when it is terrible when working with prose and poetry. What about you, what is your experience with this software like and how do you use it?
I've not used it but if its similar to ProWritingAid, which it seems to be, then the general advice is to use it for what you need (Spelling/Grammar) and only cautiously adhere to the other rules it suggests. I'm interested in your username, are you from the Isle of Sark by any chance? NC
No but the isle of sark is very beautiful and the inspiration behind the name for sure. I have been fascinated with the Channel islands for a long time and enjoy the imagery. The name has since become a character in many stories and roleplays for a long time.
Well, I'm originally from the Channel Islands so if you need help with any research, just let me know. And welcome to the forums!
Yup. Grammar's pretty complicated and I have yet to see a program that's been able to comprehend it on a large scale.
I use it for prose but not poetry.While it is quite good for prose there are times when the use of similar words it will get confused and suggest the wrong one. I simply tell it to ignore. It also helps to set it to novel.
I'm thinking about getting Grammarly but not sure whether it's worth the money. Why can't it just be a once off payment to own? ... sigh!
I tried grammarly free but it's not all that it's cracked up to be. yes it helps a little, but not enough to make me want to pay for it
I just gave grammarly free a try myself, and have to say the premium looks like it has a lot to offer. I didn't mind what the free version has to offer but I could do with a little more assistance.
I have general objections to something that uploads all my writing to someone else's computer. And while I have not tried it myself, I see the examples they offer in their ads and on their pages, and those examples tend to go into the "concise and to the point" direction of business writing. That may be suitable for business, technical-scientific, and journalist writing, but not for fiction. I have done the former (that is, technical-scientific) without any such tools (successfully enough). For the latter... I do not know if such tools are helpful. For fiction, an individual writing style is rather suitable, and almost all grammar tools (at least the ones I know) tend to take exactly that out. It may actually be helpful for that, but the price of privacy (see above) I would have to pay appears too high, for me, right now.
I use the free version of Grammarly in conjunction with the grammar and spell checkers in Word. None are perfect, because they don't always understand nuance or context, and all of them get things wrong now and then. I think of them more as tools that point out things that need further investigation. Grammarly is also notorious for not taking voice into consideration.
You're right about voice context being lost on Grammarly, as sometimes I'm writing with colloquialism and it doesn't want me to use a word or to reword the entirety. I'm using a paid subscription, and haven't tested it out completely, as yet, since I've been busy this last week (subscribed almost a week ago), but have found it instructive in the way I misuse punctuation marks. It was more expensive than I had believed as the price it's listed at is in US dollars - one of those things I should have been prepared for but simply overlooked since I was on an Australian site while I was checking it out. Liking it so far, however.
I have used Grammarly when a sentence doesn't look right to me but as for relying on it I don't because it never takes style and voice into account. I mainly use to as a red flag for passive voice and punctuation. But, when I use it, I do take the other things it points out into account. I also, when I think about it, install it to chrome to enhance my writing. Ironically, I just now installed it. XD. So until this point, you've seen my "naked" writing. As a test, I'll go around and edit it to see if Grammarly wants to improve it. My grammar is pretty good tho, it rarely has a true complaint, besides the occasional misspelled word that chrome finds.
I have the Grammarly premium package and so far I like it. It obviously won't solve all your writing issues, but it will find the stuff easily missed, plus some other issues you normally don't consider.
I've used paid Grammarly for something like a year and then switched back to free Grammarly. I don't think that I will be going back to the paid version, not anytime soon at least. I remember being pretty unconfident about my English back then and I think that's what prompted me to get it in the first place. While I've spoken English since I was small, I was not taught by natives and I've struggled with a lot of the finer points. In that sense, it did push me to go forward and try bettering myself but I don't think that's I would want to keep using it in the future - not the paid version at least. Grammarly is not exactly made for creative writing. It's made for essays. Emails. See that last one-word sentence? It would have marked that as a mistake in the paid version but everyone can understand that I've done that to obtain a certain effect. I know I am not the most tolerant person but I get quickly bored with something telling again and again that what I was doing for the sake of voice and pacing was a mistake, or that the word "he" or "she" was repeated too many times in a paragraph. I cancelled my rebilling. However, I do like the free version a lot. It catches a few more mistakes than the Word spellchecker but mostly words used in the place of another, which is great but can be caught by reading your text aloud once. I still use it in my browser, and I like the aesthetic of it - more than the one of a more traditional spellchecker, at least. I don't regret having paid for Grammarly, I think they are a good company doing good work and I am glad if I supported them, even if it was just for a bit. I just don't think that writers should use it if they can afford not to but do get it if you use professional jargon. With all that considered, they might have done a few updates recently in the paid version - I noticed that their extra mistake icon changed from yellow to blue, which might indicate a change in philosophy? Obviously I wouldn't know about that but I honestly don't think so.
I have not used grammarly. I am happy with the improvements that I have made on my own. If I want to find mistakes in my writing I usually post them on here and they stand out like a saw thumb! (Joke)
I use the free version of Grammarly and one of the biggest annoyances for me is that it cannot get "its" and "it's" straight. Grammarly tells me one or the other is wrong, every time those words appear. Also, in the story I'm writing I have a character named Monica but she uses the nickname Mouse. Grammarly can't tell the difference between "mouse" and "Mouse" and so it tells me to add an article before every instance of "Mouse" in the story. Another annoying thing is it doesn't seem to see quote marks, or at least it can't separate spoken dialogue from story telling. In dialogue I might use contractions, often, and Grammarly wants ALL of them changed to the non-contracted forms. And spoken dialogue does not have to conform to grammar rules because when we speak we often leave off the word "Do", for example, in questions "You like that?" rather than "Do you like that?" but Grammarly can't figure out the difference. It all comes down to this: use it with a grain of salt. Or better yet, many grains of salt. As well as any other grammar checker. They follow strict rules and have no idea about context (same as online translators).
The scary thing is, while you guys are picking up all sorts of instances where Grammarly gets it wrong, there must be some poor duffers out there who believe everything Grammarly tells them is right? Because, you know, it's Grammarly. Yikes. If you have to constantly patrol what Grammarly does and correct its mistakes, I'm not sure that it's much of an aid. Maybe better to just learn grammar, spelling and usage the old/hard way? And practice your own proofreading and editing. These are, after all, a writer's tools. A robot can only react to the words you've written—and then only as far as it's programmed to react; a robot isn't going to know what you were actually trying to say. It's not going to know that Mouse can be a nickname as well as a rodent, and that you may actually be using the word in both contexts. Today's robots aren't up to that level of tasking. Maybe in the future they will be ...but until then, we have the human brain. And that comes free inside every skull, and upgrades itself as directed.
I use Grammarly as I'm a professional editor and translator. And that's correct that it'll help only with grammar. It will not understand all the difficulties of the scientific style. It'll help, however, for writing good formal e-mails or something like that. Grammarly is great for the first step of the proofreading process: obvious mistakes, misspelling, but after that, you need to go through the details by hand.
It's okay. I'd say it's only reliable for things like comma usage (I tend to overuse them) and catching minor typos like typing "overused" when I meant "overuse". I wouldn't use it for more complicated grammar rules, though. I often have it suggest edits that are just flat wrong.
I had to use the free version in my creative writing class, to prove that I was editing my work. I agree about it being good for commas and other simple mistakes, but I couldn't see there being enough of a difference between the free and paid version that would cut out the proofreader and do anything a decent writer couldn't do with the free version.
