Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Grammarly.com or “To be or not to be”

Well, curiosity killed the kitten. SM put a funny cartoon on FB about grammar mistakes. Via that cartoon, I made my way to its original website, Grammarly.com, which advertises itself as the “World's Most Accurate Grammar Checker.”

Well, I had to check the checker, as I said curiosity kills me each time. In order not to be biased toward the negative side, I didn’t put any of my pieces in the box where one writes or pastes the work.

In that box, however, I wrote in a paragraph by Faulkner. The site's program graded the paragraph 65 over 100, disliked the one use of passive voice, which IMHO was necessary, suggested better vocabulary use in one place, and said an in-sentence punctuation was wrong. Lol!

There is more. They have a plagiarism detector. It didn’t detect I was copying Faulkner verbatim with punctuation included.

Truth is, grammarly.com is like a flimsy cane to lean on, and nothing can replace learning plus good judgment. I suspect they could be better than MS Word, which doesn’t use semicolons properly, plus a few other things.

Grammarly.com may be used as an unreliable checker, but a checker nevertheless, and what they say should not be taken as the final word of the Grammar gods.