Sakaane E.

I tested the free version of Grammarly today on a business document and two fiction pieces. The failure rate for Grammarly's suggestions was greater than 50% on the first document; 100% on the second (one critical error where Grammarly's correction was blatantly incorrect in context); and about 45% on the third. Most often, Grammarly failed to correctly identify the subject of a sentence so suggestions for word replacements were incorrect. Additionally, due to the free version not including genre settings and similar options, many of its suggested corrections interfered with style. This means that, on average, the author cannot really rely on Grammarly to assist with writing corrections unless the author already has a good understanding of writing rules and can therefore properly evaluate what Grammarly is suggesting. This is really no different to using Word's spelling and grammar checker, although I would say that between the two, Grammarly probably does a bit of a better job.

As a tool, it's fine to have Grammarly on hand the same way it's fine to have a hard copy dictionary. But, it should not be viewed as a one-stop solution and none of its corrections should ever be blindly accepted.