According to this chart I’m going to sound like a beta male if I don’t buy it.
If you aren’t already a really good writer, Gammarly Plus will make your work worse because you’ll accept everything it tells you, and most of its corrections (compared to regular Grammarly) are straight-up wrong. It ignores your voice, your audience, your tone, your context, etc.
That said, my work pays for Grammarly Plus & I put work-related blog posts (which will end up public anyway) through it. I like the plus version because:
- It forces me to really reread everything, because it highlights fucking everything. Often I will make changes unrelated to what it’s saying.
- It often highlights things that can be improved, but not in the way it suggests.
- Sometimes, it’s actually correct.
But usually it’s wrong. For example:
-
It tells you to remove passive voice 100% of the time. This is straight-up incorrect. For example, if you’re writing a post in which you talk about a new feature or patchnotes, you will use passive voice all the time. Sometimes the object of the sentence is actually the most important thing.
-
It often says “be more confident!” and then removes any nuance in your writing that you were using to soften the blow of something, or to make something sound more exciting, or etc.
-
It always tells you things like “don’t use the word interesting! don’t use this other word! they are too common!” Well…
- Using random fancy words is an anti-pattern. Keep on saying “interesting”
- Sometimes, this word in question is LITERALLY A TECHNICAL TERM IN YOUR FIELD. STOP TELLING ME NOT TO REPEAT IT.
-
It always wants me to say “So,” at the start of every sentence. Jesus shut up. This is a thing I’m trying to REMOVE from my writing because it’s a bad habit.
Anyway. I’d say it’s right about 10% of the time, max. Would I pay for it? Hell fucking no. Am I using it since it’s already available? Yes, absolutely. But I’m not accepting many of its changes.
Again, though, REGULAR Grammarly is usually right. Unless you have code snippets HAHAHAHAHAHAHA have fun having your Python code proofread for the rule “comma goes inside the quote.” lmao. Literally they could ignore everything inside triple backticks, but do they? No.
