Leaving Grammarly

Before moving my blog, I’d been rethinking my writing process. As I noted several months ago, I want to relieve the pressure of pushing out posts on a regular schedule by focusing on improvement and quality. That means recognizing that I earn nothing by writing faster, and that I have to actively engage with my prose. It means following a thorough process of writing and revision while not losing the intuition and nose for what feels right. It means reminding myself that patience and perseverance are always rewarding.

For a couple of years, I’ve used Grammarly to help address my writing mechanics. My comma usage is all over the place, I accidentally slip into passive voice when it’s unwarranted, and I make silly errors like everyone else. It really has been a great tool to keep my posts clean. However, similar to LLMs, it has come at the cost of losing track of my voice. When I’m not careful, Grammarly will suggest words I prefer to avoid and propose entirely rewriting paragraphs that may be clearer in the most pedantic sense, but sorely lack style and personality. It can also be far too easy to accept revisions without considering why Grammarly recommended them, or whether I agree with the given suggestion. I stopped engaging with my writing. I tried to optimize my hobby. What’s the point?

So, I canceled my Grammarly subscription.

Revisionist history

I haven’t seen every major technological shift that’s dramatically affected writing, but I’ve been writing on computers long enough to experience the evolution of spell- and grammar-check systems. Microsoft Word’s hilarious contextless spell-checker in its 2003 edition was useful for the most egregious errors, and otherwise only good to poke fun at. Teachers trained us to proofread our own work, and for good reason: it was evident that software tools couldn’t handle the assignment. Ignore their advice at your peril.

Since then, both the increase in compute power and the ubiquity of always-online software have allowed many writing tools to offer mature grammar checking systems. At work, all of my Google products and my third-party email client, Front, have the capability. And Ulysses, where I write all of my personal Markdown drafts, has a solid revision mode.¹

All of these features have two layers: First, a way to check for mistakes. Second, suggestions for improving your writing (for some definition of “improve”). Grammarly is best-in-class in that second category, and is why most people likely use it. However, in the two or so years I spent using Grammarly, I identified my biggest issues. I know what words and phrases to chop out and the sentence structures to avoid. As such, I’ve outgrown most of what Grammarly offers. I let the built-in services handle the errors, while I handle the style. (More on this later.)

Grammarly makes sense organizationally, where it can feasibly enforce a consistent style across a company. It may make that pitch to the individual, too, where you can access your voice, no matter where you’re writing. The problem is that my voice necessarily differs between work and play. It even differs between projects in each context: at work, I write emails differently than Slack messages, and those are different from formal process documentation. Let’s not mention my personal daily agenda and notes therein. For my blog, I have my default voice—this post, for example—but I love to experiment with other genres that necessitate different mechanics. Grammarly doesn’t support that flexibility with their preferred interaction via their browser plugin or desktop app. It’s only easily possible when working in a new document in their web editor, in which case they’ll ask the purpose of the document. They try not to let people know that it exists.

Grammarly is software that, at its core, is a feature instead of a product. It is designed to extend all of your text fields. They live at the edge of whatever features Google Docs and Word decide to include, or pitch themselves to chumps like me who use niche tools. While I was still using iA Writer, Grammarly made more sense. iA Writer doesn’t have any built-in grammar, style, or mechanical writing checks, so the Grammarly desktop app could sit atop it. But now, with LLMs always at my fingertips, it’s harder to find the edge that Grammarly can feasibly occupy. That’s probably why they created a feature that angered a tremendous number of writers who previously understood and appreciated everything that differentiated Grammarly. It’s one of the reasons I gave when I canceled my subscription.

It’s not me, it’s you

Grammarly’s expert review feature did not make waves until prominent experts pointed out that they had not given any permission to be included. “Expert Review” was theoretically designed to provide specific feedback based on writers and communicators in a relevant field. Academia, fiction, journalism, whatever it is, they had ingested the works of experts and trained their model to spit out advice based on a writer’s portfolio. Not only did it face immense backlash, but it didn’t appear to be implemented that well. The advice was fairly generic in the examples I saw.

I recommend reading the overview of the saga by Stevie Bonifield at The Verge if you want more details.

Expert Review didn’t work me into a frothing fury, during which I righteously canceled my subscription. It only reminded me that I still had the subscription. I had slowly chipped away at Grammarly’s intrusion into my writing life until I was left with that aforementioned document editor on the web, which I rarely remembered to use. Was that worth around a hundred dollars each year?

Disregard everything in the previous section about Grammarly being eminently replaceable. I only used its website because everything else it offers is annoying. It wants to live in your browser as an extension and, ideally, on your entire computer as a desktop app that is always hanging out in the background like the worst backseat pedant. It’s whack-a-mole trying to get it to leave me alone. I don’t need grammar check when entering the name of a school district in Salesforce, so I turn it off there. It tries to live beside the existing suggestions in Google Docs, so do I turn off all of Google’s suggestions? Let them fight? (I mostly did the latter, with amusing results.)

Even worse, in iA Writer I had to manually tell the desktop app to “Ignore for 1 hour” so I could write in peace. I don’t need colorful underlines breaking my focus when it’s hard enough to get any words out. God forbid they need to be correct on the first try. Not to mention all the other apps I use where Grammarly wants its grubby little fingers all over the text entry interface. Thank you, that typo in my to-do app is fine.

Writing is a process, and Grammarly is optimized to interject in that process. Like many AI tools, it can be an excellent way to learn. I learned how to improve my writing by reading Grammarly’s detailed comments in their fabulous web editor. I took it slow, recognized patterns, and now continually seek to address them without additional nudging. Grammarly was a step in the writing process, but I refused to yield to it as the process.

But LLM products aren’t interested in supporting that slow learning mode. They are marketed for efficiency, and that doesn’t mesh with what I need.

Effective friction

Grammarly’s reverse acquisition of Superhuman demonstrates how it views itself. It’s an AI office productivity platform that wants to act on your behalf. Here’s a blurb from Grammarly’s post about the acquisition:

Whether you try one product or the whole Superhuman suite, we hope you’ll feel momentum as it automates a rote workflow or writes in your voice.

Automating a rote workflow is cool. I have a shell alias to publish this blog, so I don’t need to remember any git commands.

Writing in my voice? That’s my job. It’s my passion.

That’s the crux of this issue. I’ve written thousands of words about my writing between this blog and my personal journal. I agonize over whether I’m any good at it, whether the years I’ve spent writing have materially improved its quality, and how to motivate myself to do the hard thing: write, then revise, then do it again.

Deciding several months ago that I would no longer stick to a weekly publishing schedule has let me build a writing process that encourages deep thought. That process isn’t streamlined. It requires intentional work, and it’s purposely ill-defined. (I have it written down and printed on a sheet of paper next to my desk. One of the steps is “Repeat (3) and (4) as needed.”)

Every possibility for tangible, real improvement exists in that friction. That’s improvement on the local scale of an individual post, and meaningful improvement in my writing overall. Every minute I dissect a sentence until I notice why it’s confusing, why it doesn’t flow, then address the issue is vital and irreplaceable. And if I want a more advanced tool to help, I have options. But I keep those questions localized to the word or sentence, and they are each a conscious choice that requires strict intervention. No tool is volunteering suggestions, and I am not one click away from fixing it.

That’s quite a bit of grandstanding. Guess what? I use the suggestions Google Docs gives me all the time. (I don’t use the suggestions in Front very often, but we all have our preferences.) At work, efficiency matters. It must be balanced with improving in my role, but it’s expected that I tactfully use the tools our company pays for to boost what we do. I’ve built a few incredible things with using Gemini and Claude, but I insist on leaving the high-value, sticky work for myself.

But that’s at work. I get paid to do that.

If I didn’t want to spend the time actually writing this blog, what would be the point? I’m doing this because I love to write. I’ve decided that improving my writing is a journey I want to experience for my entire life. That means dealing with the writer’s block, the proofreading, and when it all gets too hard, pretending that using a new text editor will fix it all.

Who wins if I write a post that technically has a correctly placed comma and is published a day earlier because I let something else do the work?

Not me.