Comment by Spivak
5 years ago
You're missing the value-prop of Grammarly -- to help someone who doesn't know write more like a fluent native English speaker. Helping someone write "more average" is exactly the point until they're fluent enough to know when and how to break the rules.
Wait until you find out about the 5 paragraph essay that's taught in HS that follows this model.
> who doesn't know write
In my experience it doesn't.
It helps people who are already reasonable good at writing English to write slightly better. Through only if their writing is limited to "business" English.
For e.g. papers it's in my experience a catastrophe.
There are also multiple categories of errors it can't cope with and does bad recommendation for. It's the kinda of errors I'm doing a lot. Maybe due to having some dyslexia, maybe because it's my second language, or maybe because my brain thinks slightly different (not joking; Luckily it's just different, not worse.).
Ten years ago I went back to school and finished my BS. All of the instructors required us to run our work through a plagiarism checker and certify that it was our original work when turned in. The plagiarism checker was part of a suite of tools that included a grammar checker, and some instructors used the grammar checker themselves when grading student work.
I always viewed the grammar checker as a crutch and only used it when required, but some students I worked with on team projects were obsessed with getting no warnings from the grammar check. There were a few ESL students that produced almost unintelligible work that had passed grammar check, and they argued with me when I tried to help them.
My best experience was when one instructor ran my work through the grammar check and then sent me the graded paper (A) which included his long critique of the changes the grammar checker had recommended.
> You're missing the value-prop of Grammarly -- to help someone who doesn't know write more like a fluent native English speaker.
That's not a part of the value of Grammarly. The tool is going to recommend mistakes; if you can't recognize them, then it will hurt you a lot more than it helps.