Comment by bjt2n3904
5 years ago
What can you do about it?
Learn to write. Don't use Grammerly. That's the article. Instead, we keep trying to find little tricks to keep the utility without surrendering privacy.
High school and college essays are already full of enough mindless fluff and tropes. Why put everything you write into something that then makes you sound like a bot? Your essays will all end up with YouTube Face.
How about non-native English speakers that are using it as an way to take tips and improve their English writing?
I'd argue that's even worse for non native speakers. It's alluring, really I see it. This would be massive amounts of utility if I were trying to learn French.
But the cost is it's not actually natural, it's what the AI says is natural.
There are plenty of ways to improve your English without grammarly.
Yes but if people are gravitating towards Grammerly it's because it's offering something those other ways aren't.
I mean I guess you can learn an instrument by reading sheet music and sheer force of will but I think most people prefer lessons.
2 replies →
Yeah. Grammarly greatly improved my English.
> Learn to write. Don't use Grammerly.
*Grammarly.
Oh dear! I walked right into that one didn't I? :'D
Well, it's Grammarly, not Vocabarly or Spellarly
I know how to write, but trimming down content the way grammerly does(Which is presumably what many want to see, since it's everywhere) , takes time.
I've never been to school, and I probably wouldn't use it for anything like an essay in real life, but it seems good when brevity is the main critical factor and sounding like a bot is expected.
I rarely ever see writing outside of actual books, and pre-2008ish news articles that specifically impresses me though, so maybe it's not the best for anything that matters, bot style writing does get pretty painful to read for hours.
Sounding like a bot is improvement for most high school essays. And the fact is, without someone or something correcting you, your learning to write will be much slower.