Grammarly Grammar-Checking Software

Grammarly (http://www.grammarly.com/) recently gave me a one-month trial membership to review their grammar checker. They bill themselves as "The World's Best Grammar Checker." If you've ever run Word's grammar checker and seen all the squiggly green lines popping up where they have no business being, you're probably thinking, "That's not saying much." So how did they do?

I had some initial problems just getting up and running. At first I couldn't copy and paste onto the website form in Firefox, and so was limited to the “upload” option. Using the upload option also misread the length of my document, so even though it is supposed to allow 20 pages of text, it complained that 16 pages uploaded in a .doc file was longer than its limit. After I found and installed the Firefox add-on that allows copy-and-paste on the Grammarly website, things went a bit more smoothly. This is also about when I learned that there was no cancel button once it starts processing text, as I noticed when I accidentally selected the wrong type of review.

Once you're ready to review your manuscript, it offers several options as to what type of writing your manuscript is, from academic to creative. I stuck with the creative setting, since the documents that I ran through it were manuscripts I had to critique. It reports the results grouped by category.

There were some good things about Grammarly. It does a great job catching comma usage problems and potential run-on sentences, which are two of the most common grammar problems I see when critiquing less-experienced writers. It also marked confusing modifiers and punctuation errors within a sentence correctly, most of the time. The place Grammarly really stands out is in its detailed explanations of the grammar errors it finds, which could be useful for a beginning writer or someone who speaks English as a second language. It was very nice to be able to just copy and paste the results (when they were valid) into the critiques I was sending out (telling them what the source was, of course).

However, the bad more than balanced the good. Grammarly flags sentences ending with a preposition as being grammatically incorrect—this is not true, though it is one of the top 10 grammar myths! It flagged accidentally run-together words for not-relevant grammar errors, instead of simple spelling errors (which it also searches for). Most of the review categories' suggestions were almost always wrong, particularly the use of articles and pronoun agreement sections. The commonly confused words category was worse than useless on a story written at some level of proficiency.

Overall, I would say that this service is not worth paying for. There are some exceptions to this. If you're just beginning to write or don't speak English as a first language, it could be a useful teaching tool. Even when Grammarly incorrectly flags something as being in error, the explanation of why is useful and would illustrate examples of the kind of error that may occur. It could also be good for someone who does a lot of critiques or copywriting, to help save them time. I do a fair number of critiques and Grammarly was helpful with those, but the price point is too high to be worth it to a casual user like me. And last but not least, an institutional license does seem like it could be a good investment for a school.