Grammarly is Garbage, and Here's Why

As someone contracted by Grammarly to proofread for them and train their AI, I think this video is spot-on. The program is really only useful in limited contexts because language is so complex and fluid, and it's for sure false advertising to make it seem like you can use it for all kinds of writing and become a better writer in general. You need a lot more than an AI program pointing out grammar mistakes to become a better writer.

You know. Having bad grammar can actually express stuff
THIS IS YELLING
This is dead serious
This Is Even More Serious
this is calm
ThIs Is MoCkInG
And "taht" is just "that" with a accident.

YEEEES
ZOINKS ZOINKS ZOINKS

I agree that grammarly isn't perfect. Best used to look over the red lines stuff, the clarity suggestions are honestly often wrong. I've used it quite a bit for university papers. I often just ignrore most their suggestions to fix my "passive voice".

I got a grammarly ad on this video 😂

I Agree
Thearchy -> Therado keyboard (???)
Paroxym -> Melody (uh)
Song -> song (WTF)

You are so right.

The things I'd do to you. (:

grimm over u and family buddy dont be talkin' out herei n the hood cuh u dont bellong here grimmarly over you

this is the first time and last time im asking you dont come in my way i have connections

I wonder if Grammarly would work better for a language with a case system like German?

Help I got an ad for Grammarly before this video

I love this video!

My grammar opinions:

-- "irregardless" doesn't really make sense but I know what people mean so I don't care
-- I am a singular they so I like it
-- sometimes you don't really need the oxford comma; sometimes you really REALLY do
-- "very" is not an illegal word any anyone who thinks otherwise can fight me

For starters, it helps when you discuss "irregardless" not within a discussion of grammar, but instead of English usage. The point here is that "irregardless" is not a word, and it has nothing to do with grammar. The actual word people are seeking is merely "regardless."
It's NOT a grammar issue.

If you were my professor, I'd would drop your course.

"Passive voice is not wrong." PREACH IT! The point of passive voice is to emphasize that what happened is more important than which agent did it. Scientific writitng uses passive voice all the time for this reason. It doesn't matter which intern performed the ELISA.

Got an ad for grammarly while waiting to watch the video lol

You are spot on. I use Grammarly to correct my mild dyslexia but often keep the text context I attempt to use in my online debate. I wish I had paid more attention to grammar in School.

Grammarly makes all writers sound the same way that Ted Talks make every speaker sound the same.

I knew Grammarly wasnt the right choice for me when it tried to correct "urn" to "run" in the sentence "he solemnly placed the empty urn on the table"

My stories also have a ton of constructed words that i had to spend hours upon hours telling my computer are not mistakes, and when i installed grammarly, it flagged all of them again, after claiming it would sync with my custom dictionary

Grammarly also keeps a record of each person's words as property so to speak. Certain phrases or abbreviated short text are always flagged as stated here it changes the entire context of the message. If a basic tool not advanced it is easirer than correcting every single thing.Not my favorite to have cookie cutter writing that eliminates self expression of free speech style. As a basic tool it is a nice tool. Read terms of service and what is agreed to before using. It seems somewhat an infringement of individual rights to freedom of speech, writing style, and self expression on a person.

Write more better 😂😂

Grammarly is racist because it won't allow me to speak gibberish.

Thank you for once again so clearly (and concisely) articulating those nagging gut feelings about an otherwise potentially helpful tool. And that's all these early generation AI genie's-in-a-bottle ever are ... TOOLS! 😺

It is double, when someone makes a spelling mistakes no one would care.
But then when they don't use dots and put the words in such a way that you can take multiple meanings from the same sentence is where the problems begin.
While I hate grammar since I'm dyslectic myself but that doesn't justify people just to ignore all rules.
The most funny part is when those people (spelling correctors lol) talk about you spelling but are unable to understand basic words.

The composing to composting change may have been suggested because the AI was likely trained on many texts that contained the phrase “school-based composting” but few or none they contained “school-based composing”.

I didn’t spend decades reading great authors and finding my own voice to have it pulverized into an homogenized style, reminiscent of the average high school freshman.
The current state of Large Language Models and Generative AI is just not good enough yet to deeply understand what the author means and to generate improvements that maintain the nuance and intentions in the writing.
It may be useful for people who are not fluent in the language, but then you have the issue that the author may not catch inadvertent changes to the meaning of their text.

NOT ME GETTINF A FUCKIN GRANMARLY AD ON THIS VIDEO

Starts watching a video about why grammarly is bad

Grammarly ad: Allow me to introduce myself😅

I don't like it because the idea that college students/grown adults period might be so incompetent that they need a bot to help them write is fucking atrocious.

A lot of the things you point out Grammarly saying is incorrect, it actually doesn't say it's incorrect. It's usually a suggestion. Usually for correction, I've found it to be accurate. Not always for sure, and why I ignore it sometimes. But it's useful for catching random errors that I didn't notice myself, and especially with fixing comma placement.

Anyone else get a Grammarly ad on this?

AI is good at solving the low-hanging fruit type errors, but beyond that it is not going to make an average writer into a writing master. I would recommend MS Word for a basic once over and just run with that.

I can see Grammarly being useful for rigid, professional writing. For creative fiction, it's maddening. A.I. cannot learn style or recognize when a writer is making a stylistic choice. This is especially true in character dialogue. People in low places do not speak perfectly. A writer can use their poor grammar or misuse of words to convey the education level of a character. A writer can have clear and relatively concise writing but a style that is not traditional. Grammarly flags so many perfectly fine phrases and sentences it's endlessly distracting. It's great at flagging my overuse of commas and is generally good for punctuation... but it's garbage for grammar.

I have never used Grammarly.
But I have, over the years, put together many papers, both academic and otherwise, using Word. I'm Irish and so many times, I have had to change the "Default Language" halfway through because Word's error check didn't like my Hiberno-English.
Further, too often Word's default is US English, hence I can find my papers covered with red lines because US English cannot spell...
If Grammarly is repeating the same "mistakes" then clearly their programmers have learnt NOTHING from more than twenty years of Word's "history"...

and how much is this variety tailored to neurodivergent people who cannot understand it because you are factually wrong?

Yall are really weird on still using grammarly after 2022, with chatgpt exisiting

Not me seeing this just after I finished editing an essay using grammarly as my main editing tool

how DARE you?! yes, Grammarly still has some issues, but that’s because they’re learning and improving their program! have you even READ the Grammarly, blog?! well I have, and unlike YOU, I know all about the slippery slope fallacy! Grammarly is not a professional editor, it’s a GRAMMAR TOOL! my spelling would have DIED in a DITCH without this tool. I know it’s been two years, but TAKE IT BACK NOW. Grammarly doesn’t mark things as “incorrect,” it marks them as things that could be approved. It once to make your writing concise and easy to read. It’s okay to say that some suggestions aren’t for you, but to say that the program is garbage is totally out of line and completely unfair.




(this is all for a joke, your entitled to you own opinion of course! :))

did anyone else get a grammarly ad on this video LOL

I wanna relearn grammar and all the things that come with it. I never understood participles and when to use active voice or passive voice. This video made me realize I’m using Grammarly as crutches.

I used to use grammarly a lot, and I think it corrupted my writing style because now I'm constantly flagged by AI writing detectors because of my "unique" style...

OCT-2023- I used Grammarly for more than a year and it was helpful for volume marketing text, however, recently it will not load my Premium account and defaults to Business, and that loads with many missing files so Grammarly is now useless. The G help people try but can not resolve the problem. I think Grammarly is Broken.. Take care RT

I got a Grammarly ad on this video! 😂😭

Teachers just circling something with no explanation for why it's wrong was definitely a huge issue growing up

I like your videos, but I cannot find myself to think that this is your good one. It is very hard to follow what point you are trying to make. I am not a Grammarly shill or anything, I haven't used their services in a long while.

I understand your point, that language is fluid and making a good text isn't about finding correct answers to questions, but rather trying your best to make the text serve the function you want it to serve.

In that sense, doesn't Grammarly serve its function? Doesn't it provide you options, which could be used to make it better in your way? It doesn't force you to use those things, in fact, in gives you an option to disregard the provided suggestion.

If that doesn't make sense, because that's not how Grammarly is advertised, since they are advertising it as a tool for writers, who don't have enough time to go over the text too many times, to find errors and better structures to make their text easier to read, then I just cannot agree with you. It serves its function well in that regard too, as it gives you suggestions on what to put there, it gives you points of interests that you might want to reconsider with options on how to remake it, which, in turn, should make the process easier.

And overall, it is very hard to follow the point you are trying to make. It goes from trying to make an argument on the social perception about grammar and how Grammarly might affect it in a negative way, then skips to how it doesn't help you understand grammar, then you say how it actually doesn't help writers, then you say you actually like Grammarly, despite your opposing claims from the beginning, making it hard to see what relationship those two opposing points have.

Overall a mishmash of ideas with weak argumentation. No offence though, you still did a good putting this together.

@joebloggs5454
1 second ago
I have used Grammarly successfully for more than a year with good outcomes. NOT NOW! Grammarly has run off the tracks. I do get prompt problem assistance, but after many responses, Grammarly still does not work. Something bad has happened, and I have asked for a subscription refund, but now my inbox is silent. They can't fix it, and they won't refund your money. Take care! Joe



Reply

Grammarly suggestions could be overall wrong and inconsistent. It doesn't let you learn from your mistakes and when you make punctuation mistakes. This spellchecker doesn't make any review of your mistakes. Most times Grammarly is good at pointing out spelling mistakes. But punctuation mistakes are misleading and often wrong. Look, when they point out "wordy sentences," information in this text could be there for a reason. One of the other issues is that when you use a quotation as sarcasm you have to punctuate it to be grammatically correct, but in AmE, using quotations as sarcasm is grammatically correct. I suggest don't always trust these punctuation suggestions and use your gut. It's often misleading. Use it only for spelling mistakes.

So many online grammar tools are full of shit. I cannot tell you how many times they've told me my sentence was incorrect, when it most-definitely was not. Spelling and punctuation are what online dictionaries are best at, but anything else and they're just ruining the legibility of my work.

i've been writing for years now. i tried Grammarly for about a week in high school and absolutely despised it. whenever anyone asked me if i used it or any other gramar/spellchecks (it happened about half a dozen times bc small class size and i was the only one that year with any kind of creative writing skill in a language arts class that had a teacher assigning creative writing assignments like five times that year) i always advised against it, but also prefaced that it was personal preference. i hated how it slowed down my writing process, made more mistakes than not at the time, and all the features they bragged about were behind a paywall. granted this was like four years ago so it's probably changed, but i really don't even want to try grammarly again.

Grammarly is a pretty strong example of negative linguistic prescriptivism.