![]() The inaccurate corrections are most often with articles and punctuation, as represented here. Here are some examples of some of the recent corrections Grammarly has given me. ![]() I tried Grammarly with some text that I had recently written, and it found 15 errors that Microsoft Word’s grammar checker didn’t find, most of which were accurate corrections. Instead, I was hopeful that I could find a tool to share with students who have concerns about lower-order concerns as they do final edits. This time I was not worried about being replaced. In the more than five years that have passed since the last time I considered Grammarly, I thought maybe it had improved greatly, so I decided to give it another try. It also now has services and features for more global concerns including a “tone detector.” An October 2020 product update suggests the Grammarly Premium “helps multilingual English speakers write more fluently.” According to its website, Grammarly now has 30,000,000+ daily users, is licensed by 1000+ educational institutions, has free extensions for web browsers so that it can give feedback on writing any text field (e.g., in Canvas message boards, Tweets, etc.) as it’s being written, and has a Microsoft Word plug-in. It offers me feedback as I draft emails in the web version of Outlook, collaborate on drafts in Google Docs, and elsewhere (whether I want corrective feedback or not). In my work and personal communications, automated written corrective feedback (AWCF) software seems to be everywhere I type. ![]() It’s many years later, and I’m now a Faculty Associate with UW-Madison’s Writing Center. I continued to provide writing support that didn’t include room for corrective software at the final editing stage. Occasionally students would ask me about Grammarly, but I would tell them that it might do more harm than good. My fear of being replaced by a machine was quickly assuaged. Many of the corrections were simply wrong, and some weren’t wrong but could be more confusing than helpful. I played around with different texts and wrote sentences with common grammar issues that I encountered in my work at the writing center to see what kinds of corrections Grammarly offered. At the time, you copied and pasted your text into the grammar checker on the Grammarly website. I was sure that it wouldn’t be able to catch errors in idiomatic phrases, collocation, and articles–and surely it would have just as many faulty corrections as correct ones. I went to the Grammarly website to set my worries to rest.
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