These Are the Best Uses for Grammarly—and the Worst

The following is an excerpt from my book, A Proofreader’s Guide to Business Writing. You can learn more and order a copy here.

I occasionally get a note from a client that reads something like this:

“Hey, do you have time to look over this for me? If not, no worries—I can just run it through Grammarly and call it a day.”

Whenever I get a message like this, I want to scream, “NOOO! Don’t do that!”

It’s not that I dislike Grammarly. I actually think it’s a great tool, and I use it daily. What’s more, it’s an important part of the proofreading process that you’ll be learning later on in this book.

But if you’re wondering if you can just rely on it (or native spellcheckers) to proofread your business content for you, I have some bad news: you can’t.

What Grammarly Can Do

Spell- and grammar-checking programs like Grammarly or Word’s native offerings (henceforth, I’ll be using “Grammarly” as an umbrella term) are important tools in the proofreader’s toolkit. But like any tool, it only works when you know how to use it.

Grammarly is very good at finding certain common mistakes quickly.

If you’ve clearly misspelled a word, for example, the tool will usually catch it. If you’re missing a definite or indefinite article (i.e., a “the” or an “a”), it’s also pretty good at catching the omission. So if you typed the word “fight” but spelled it “fihgt,” Grammarly will point it out to you. (As I’m writing this, in fact, there’s a bright red line under “fihgt”—both of them!)

It can also help you quickly locate instances where there’s an extra space, a missing comma, or some other hard-tosee mistake. Although there are other ways to catch these mistakes that we’ll discuss later, it’s nice to be able to quickly scan through a document and address a large chunk of them in short order.

Another selling point of Grammarly is its ability to help you find the right preposition for the job. Even a pro like me still stumbles over—or is it with?—prepositions (it’s “stumbles over,” by the way). But generally speaking, prepositions are tricky even for native speakers to get right all the time.

And if, like me, sometimes you have a hard time spelling a particularly tricky word, if you give it your best guess, Grammarly can often figure out what you were trying to write. No matter how many times I look it up, I still have trouble with the word “bureaucracy,” for example, but as long as I don’t butcher it too much, spell-check is right there with the answer.

What Grammarly Can’t Do

This is all well and good, and those features alone make using the tool worthwhile. But it’s equally important to consider its many drawbacks and limitations.

First, Grammarly misses a lot of mistakes.

I regularly get documents from clients that are perfect as far as grammar- and spellcheckers are concerned. I run the same tests myself and they come back clean. But once I start digging into the text, it’s another story!

My pen has bled over copy that Grammarly assured me was A-OK. Poor word choice, entirely wrong words, terrible punctuation errors—it has missed it all and then some.

If I were to hazard a guess—and this is admittedly anecdotal—I would wager that Grammarly catches a bit over 50 percent of all mistakes.

Batting over .500 is great if you’re a baseball player; it’s not so good if you’re trying to write excellent content to stand out as an expert in your field.

Second, Grammarly is wrong a lot of the time.

It’s bad enough that it misses so many mistakes, but often the mistakes (or corrections) it flags are false alarms. In fact, just a few paragraphs above, Grammarly wants me to change “My pen has bled over copy” to “My pen has bled over a copy.” For some reason, it doesn’t know that you can use the word “copy” as a synonym for “text” or “content.” (For an even stranger reason, it’s not telling me to correct the same error in this paragraph!)

That’s just one example of what I see day in and day out. I dismiss a large number of flags because they’re flat-out wrong.

Third, Grammarly doesn’t always follow established style guides.

I can’t really blame it for this one. There are several major style guides out there—Chicago, AP, and MLA, just to name a few. And the same applies to dictionaries. Some words are spelled differently in Merriam-Webster than in OED, for instance. It doesn’t know which ones you’re following, and so it goes with whatever its programming says is right.

And if you have an internal style guide that deviates further, well, it may flag a lot of stylistic choices as errors. While there is some customization you can do, it’s hard to explain to these programs exactly what you want all of the time.

How to Use Grammarly the Right Way

Again, despite all these drawbacks, I still believe the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. It’s definitely better than nothing, and using it does save you from making a lot of mistakes simply because you didn’t notice them.

And since Grammarly and native apps are free, you’re not out any money.

So what’s the best way to view using Grammarly? As one tool among many in the proofreading process. I personally view these tools as my “proofreading interns.” I let them do the most menial of tasks—finding commonly misspelled words, omitted or extra punctuation, and so on—but I absolutely check their work. They’re helpful but not up to the quality level where I trust them to be anywhere near 100 percent accurate.

Simply put, there will always be an element of human verification when using any spell-checking tool. The point of Grammarly isn’t to remove the person from the equation; it’s to give the person a way to make checking text easier. Ultimately, you still have to make the final call.