Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/07/why-grammarly-is-like-having-a.html
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Last time I looked Grammarly sent everthying you type to their servers, since it‘s a pure cloud service.
Perhaps this has changed, but I thought a prospective buyer would want to check this out for themselves.
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When I used it a while back it made too many incorrect corrections/errors for my liking. Do not take all its recommendations as gospel!
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If all you are concerned about is emails, the free version of grammarly will do that for free. and if you want to ‘game’ it for short passages, that’s not difficult. cheers. I recommend that students, especialy ESL students acquire it. cheers.
Grammar checkers have been around for 25+ years and they still aren’t worth a damn. They miss real errors more often than not and they offer tons of incorrections that make matters worse rather than better. Computers can’t parse grammar any better now than they could in the early 90’s, and grammar checking programs are basically cons preying on the insecurity of people who are uncomfortable with writing to make a quick buck for a product that never delivers on its promises.
That’s really bad advice.
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So TechBros are disrupting my spellcheck now?
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I did some beta testing work for something like this once, and, yeah, it was crap. It couldn’t parse grammar well, so it would see mistakes where there were none. As for style, in the name of concision, it demanded the removal of any use of “however” or “therefor” or any other linking word. Which can, admittedly, be overused, but are also vital in making a piece of writing not feel like a jumble of disconnected sentences. Transition words and signposts are vital.
If you don’t understand the grammatical and stylistic rules behind the machine’s recommendations, your writing will be worse coming out than it was going in. If you do understand them, it’s probably not worth the price to get a program you’ll disagree with half the time anyway.
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THIS! (A thousand times, this.)
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That would certainly rule it out for anything work-related.
Pretty much this. I’ve been trying to get windows to stop correcting anything I do for ages, but every time it updates it reverts to the defaults and all that work is for nothing. I think a way more useful product than another grammar checker would be something that automatically configures windows to turn off assistive/predictive anything, in every program, and keeps it that way. If I wanted to capitalize a letter, I would, and I know whether it should be capitalized better than Windows does. If I want to highlight something, I’ll highlight what I want, and I don’t need the OS fixing it for me to add that little bit at the beginning.
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Maybe before boing boing shills for this it should be used on all the posts for a week. See how it holds up. Could be informative, probably would be entertaining.
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Hmm.
Often when I hit the reply button, I am hit with the sudden sudden relization that I should have spent more time looking over my final darft. If I had just spent a few more seconds looking over my post, I wouldn’t have cåuse to blush with embarrassment.
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Oh.
This is the sort of linguistic interference up with which we shall not put.
Alea iucta est, et al.
I thank you.
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For those who don’t know, a lot of services have started using various AI algorithms in their products. I’ve read in a number of places how in the past year or so Google Translate and other similar programs have gotten noticeably better
Is Grammarly much better than older grammar programs? No idea. I just want to put the idea out there that eventually someone is going to create a much better program and no matter how good it is many commentators will insist that all such programs are bad.
My Grammar is OK, but I’d like it to be good enough to write short stories without people rolling their eyes at obvious mistakes. Like changing a tense in the middle of a paragraph and not noticing. Things like that. Will Grammarly help me with that? No idea, but maybe I’ll give it a try.
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