Grammarly

FYI, I use Grammarly for editing.    It isn't perfect, but even the free version is pretty good.   One of the readers for the (old) Lush advised I use.   College grad that I am, the suggestion hurt my pride I bit, but I've been using for over two years now.   As I do a fair amount of mainstream writing, for me, the professional version is worth the price.  Just wanted to share. 

I agree.

I have noticed a couple of quirks. Grammarly will flag any sentence that starts with the word This.  

I don't write at a graduate college level, so I'm always amused when one of my words gets flagged as Even an educated audience may not know it.

But have your wits about you, take its comma prompts with a pinch of salt. 

Having used it for a number of year now, it has started to affect my enjoyment of all manner of prose. When reading even the most lauded, accomplished of authors, I often find myself mentally inserting a phantom comma in all the places I know grammarley would suggest one.

But of course the use of commas (generally) is not chiselled in stone, except in the most obvious, agreed upon places. Read any contemporary style/punctuation manual to see what I mean.

Having said that, sometime I just do not have the courage to disregard grammarley's intrusive gate crashing of my creative flow.

Quote by LucaByDesign

Having said that, sometime I just do not have the courage to disregard grammarley's intrusive gate crashing of my creative flow.

If Shakespeare had Grammarly, we wouldn't have Shakespeare. 

Their ads annoy the crap out of me. I don't know if I'd use it or not based on that. 

I write using the system here on LS. How do I get Grammarly on here to help me? Thanks for any help I cam get. Lee.

Quote by Reacher1966

I write using the system here on LS. How do I get Grammarly on here to help me? Thanks for any help I cam get. Lee.

Quote by Reacher1966

I write using the system here on LS. How do I get Grammarly on here to help me? Thanks for any help I cam get. Lee.

Get out of LS. Google Grammarly. There is a free version, which is quite good (and great for free). It will correct all you text, in FB, email, LS and so on.

As a dyslexic, Grammarly saves me uncounted hours of repetitious rereading during edits. Without it, I have a bad tendency to repeat or invert words. My dyslexia affects my writing in many ways beyond that as well from basic spelling to homophones. In my past writing, it would take me days or weeks of rereading it line by line before my mind saw the problems and even then when I posted the problems could persist.

Grammarly has me correcting those issues quickly and easily.

That said, I tend to ignore its suggestions for rephrasing my sentences. Left to itself, Grammarly is going to give you a sentence that is lifeless and mechanical, and will always flag any metaphorical phrases one might create.

It’s a tool like any other, but if you rely on it to do your writing for you, you’re not going to get pros worth reading.

In fact, I ran this post, through Grammarly and disregarded a couple of changes that it wanted to make, but I also corrected many mistakes that I simply wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

Quote by LordCephius
Grammarly will flag any sentence that starts with the word This.

Interesting. I've written for a few places with strict style guides in my time, and one in particular had editors who flagged my use of "this". I was told that starting sentences with This, or using this without any further clarification, adds cognitive load (or somesuch) to the reader who has to remember what this refers to. It also breaks SVO by having the subject/object in another sentence.

I'm not a Grammarly (or any checker) user but I'd be interested to know if the following passages are flagged. Version one uses "this" without any object:

The log files will be scanned for configuration settings and other metadata. This can take a few minutes for very large files.

And version two uses "this" with a qualifier to remind people of the object:

The log files will be scanned for configuration settings and other metadata. This verification process can take a few minutes for very large files.

To me, as a reader, I think the immediacy of the first one is still clear. There are no actions in the previous sentence other than "scanning" to which the object could be attached, and the sentence is short enough to fit in most people's working memory without losing flow.

I guess the second one could be shortened to "This process", which is perhaps better, and still attaches "this" to the action of scanning. It's more correct but I'd argue any of the above work.

This (situation, haha) is probably one of those scenarios where breaking the rule is okay if clarity is maintained, but Grammarly may not grasp the nuances of language with its strict built-in rulesets.

^This. 😅

Some moderators like grammerly and tell me my almost pathological disregard for commas is upsetting and tell me to put it through grammerly which, to my mind, as a hiberno-english speaker seems so over the top.

Like WW I will start sentences with this and also with but, which I was also told never to start a sentence with.

Grammerly tries to force me to write properly and I will listen to it and happily click dismiss dismiss dismiss.

This is the only way. And now I'm forcing you to remember what the this was from a previous paragraph

I hate grammarly.

It should be used as tool to check for obvious errors, if needed. When it starts suggesting things or changing the author voice, it can take a running fuck to itself.

In my most humble opinion...

😇

Quote by Jen

I hate grammarly.

It should be used as tool to check for obvious errors, if needed. When it starts suggesting things or changing the author voice, it can take a running fuck to itself.

In my most humble opinion...

😇

I agree completely because grammar is my weak point. English is very different to French, so Grammarly helps a lot but it is a very mixed blessing. I read its suggestions and am often torn between two options.

Your humble opinion matters to me. 😘

I’ve found Grammarly to be incredibly helpful in catching errors that my eyes skim over. And incredibly boneheaded in its suggestions about almost everything else.

By the way, I only use the browser add-in, which I enable only when I need it, and NOT the application. There was a time a couple of years ago, when I was still on a Mac, that my computer kept getting slower and slower, to where it was almost unusable, even if I was hardly running anything. Restarting didn’t help, either. The system monitor revealed that the Grammarly app was gorging itself on resources - doing what, God only knows. I deleted the app and my system immediately worked fine again. That is absolutely unacceptable.