Review: Grammarly does not do the needful

Grammarly, a writing enhancement plaform and app, falls short on its promise to clean up your spelling, grammar and usage on social media platforms – especially for non-native speakers.

Grammarly, a free browser extension, flags up errors as you type posts on LinkedIn, WordPress, Tumblr, Gmail, Facebook and other platforms.

First impressions matter in the business world, whether in the form of an introductory email or a browse of a potential partner’s LinkedIn page. Spelling and grammar mistakes in these contexts can be disastrous and for people writing in a second or third language, they can also be hard to avoid, even with the checkers built into email providers and word-processing software.

That’s the idea behind Grammarly, a free browser extension that flags up errors as you type posts on LinkedIn, WordPress, Tumblr, Gmail, Facebook and other platforms. You can also upload documents or paste text that you want to check to the web-based Grammar Editor, at Grammarly.com, also for free.

This sounds great, but natural language is still notoriously hard for machines to fathom. To test Grammarly’s capabilities, I pasted the first two paragraphs of this review into the spelling and grammar checker. It flagged up the fact that I’d used “browse” as a noun, which it designated “possibly confused”. I concede it’s not the most common use of the word, although a quick glance in a dictionary confirms it’s perfectly legitimate.

I then pasted an error-riddled text from a grammar quiz online, and the results were not good. Of the 10 mistakes, it found only three: glaring mistakes such as “his two daughters […] lives” and “she don’t intend to” went undetected.

Users report that the premium version of the service, which adds “100+ additional advanced grammar and spelling checks” to the 150 “critical checks” that come with the free version, is a big improvement. This premium software (US$29.95 a month) also makes suggestions for alternatives to often-repeated words, and offers genre-specific writing style checks and a plagiarism detector. However, users report that it’s still not accurate enough to rely on. While those with atrocious spelling and grammar might learn something from the service, they might also be confused by erroneous advice.

The capability of machines to understand natural language is improving all the time, but AI may never be good enough to truly grasp all the double meanings and inventive uses for the English language. For now, you’d be better off buying a grammar and spelling book and learning the old-fashioned way.

q&a right words, right context

How does it work?

Grammarly’s algorithms scan the context for each word and suggest corrections for grammar, spelling, punctuation and, in the premium version, style, wordiness and plagiarism. The reason behind each correction is explained, so you can make an informed decision about whether to make the suggested change.

How did the product come about?

According to an interview with Xconomy, after Ukrainian engineers Max Lytvyn and Alex Shevchenko sold their first company, MyDropBox.com, they were left with a killer team that had nothing to work on. They were challenged to come up with the most interesting problem they could think of, and hit on the idea of an accurate spelling and language checker. Grammarly launched in 2009 and has been improving its service since then.

How popular is it?

While the company doesn’t release user numbers, a Grammarly spokesperson points out that over 9 million users and 13,000 reviews are tracked in the app’s page on the Chrome store.

What software is Grammarly compatible with?

The browser extension works with Chrome, Safari and Firefox. Grammarly also comes as a native app for Windows and Mac, as an add-on for Microsoft Office, and as a web-based service, called Grammarly Editor, at grammarly.com.

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