Grammarly

Monday. February 20, 2023 - 1 min

Grammarly is a writing tool to help craft high-quality and coherent text. It’s a spell checker with superpowers.

At the moment, on any given day, I might write for:

My students
My blog
My secret content-based project
My book
My clients

Added up, this can amount to thousands of words crafted each day. Using Grammarly makes editing much quicker and simpler.

I do have one problem with the tool. It’s effectively a key logger. Almost every word you type gets sent to their servers for analysis and feedback. This does not sit well with me. Here’s how I use it:

The workflow

I write drafts using nvAlt or Simplenote, depending on the device in use. There are no extensions for these programs, which is one of the reasons they’re used.

Once I’m happy with the draft, I drop it into Grammarly’s online editor for tidying up.

In the past, I’d used the extension in the browser and wrote in Google Docs. The constant popping up of suggestions related to the last few words typed can brake my train of thought. Whilst this isn’t a huge problem, it’s more effective (and enjoyable) to get the words out before trying to perfect them.

The exception is the post for my subscriber(s). These fantastic humans get early access to long-ish form posts via Google docs. For this, I write in Google docs within Chrome, where the extension is installed. This is the only time I use Chrome, so I’m happy to give Grammarly the permissions needed.