Even though my bread and butter is copyediting, I have a side job at the local university as an academic writing tutor in the Writing Centre.
I had a student come in with a paper today. There were quite a few spelling, grammatical, punctuation, and clarity issues. Because she had used Grammarly, which her instructor had recommended to her, she was surprised at the large number of issues I found.
Please do not rely on Grammarly or the built-in spelling/grammar checkers in word processors (Word, Open Office, Google Docs, etc). These are software built to analyze text based on set rules and parameters, and they cannot determine nuance or context. They’ll make your paper better, but they won’t make it perfect.
For example, one word this student used was “implication”, but she meant “implementation”. Grammarly couldn’t determine that, but because I, as a human editor, could detect context, I was able to pick up on it.
Also, Grammarly doesn’t recognize Canadian English; we Canadians must choose either US or UK English, which results in a lot of what we write being marked wrong.
About a year ago, I edited a master’s thesis for a client who had used Grammarly when writing. Several of the errors flagged by Grammarly weren’t even errors, and it missed several errors. Here are two screenshots; the one on the left is the Grammarly results and the one on the right is my results (after the Grammarly suggestions had been implemented, mind you).
As you can see, Grammarly missed dozens of errors. And that’s just on this one page. The 10-page document was riddled with these.
Remember, if clarity of your message is critical to your written work, please use a copyeditor. I charge only $15/page ($7.50 if you’re a student).
Robots are smart, but not smart enough.
