Is Grammarly OK to Use?

When is the best, absolutely beyond a doubt guaranteed foolproof time to find typos in your writing?

No matter how carefully I proofread, and no matter how many times, the optimal time for finding typos is, in my experience, hands down: as soon as I click "send."

It's really no wonder we all long for a magic bullet to raise our success rate from 99.9999999999999% accuracy to 100%.

With all the AI swirling around us, is it reasonable to use the platforms not as a replacement for writing, but as tools to catch errors and improve what we've written? Specifically, what about Grammarly?

Spoiler: it's not the magic bullet. But let's start with what it does well: short-form work.

Grammarly was built for students, business writers, and commercial use—where writing is often more formulaic. Because of that, it tends to prioritize its own bland, standardized style over your voice. There’s not a lot of room in those writing styles for creativity, so if you have a strong voice — as most creative writers do — Grammarly may recommend edits that flatten or erase it. The natural consequence is that it doesn’t always read complex sentences well.

You can customize what it checks, exclude specific keywords (great for fantasy names or made-up terms), and it doesn’t use your writing to train its model, which adds some peace of mind. But it does learn from user feedback, which can amplify bad “group think” over time.

Another big con: it often flags things as incorrect that aren’t incorrect because (hey guess what!) machines make mistakes.

I've previously compared Grammarly to using a calculator without understanding math. If you type 12 × 12 and accidentally hit an extra key, you might get 1,440 instead of 144—and if you don’t already know the answer, you wouldn’t catch that. Grammarly’s the same way: helpful, but only if you already understand the rules.

Let's take commas. If you’ve got a comma before a coordinating conjunction, it might wrongly tell you it’s fine—even if it causes a comma splice. Or it might tell you a serial comma is wrong when it’s actually right. I couldn’t possibly list all the examples, but Grammarly often gives bad suggestions for things that aren't problems and misdiagnoses real problems, too. Review every suggestion. Every. Single. One. If you're not sure, do your research until you are #1 sure, or #2 willing to make a deliberate, considered choice.

If you're writing short pieces, Grammarly might be all you need. But for long-form writing—like a book—you’ll find it much less helpful, especially since you have to upload in chunks, which would likely get annoying fast.

So, bottom line: Grammarly's a great tool if you're already confident in your grammar and just want a second pair of eyes. But if you're looking for real help with voice, style, or deeper writing craft, you're not going to find anything useful here.

As for those typos, I get it. But as I tell myself, don't be discouraged. Errors sometimes have a such a strong will to live that they remain standing through dozens of readings by dozens of readers. Unless we're machines, we're human after all. Our very, very, very best is always going to be at least a little flawed.

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