Grammarly - I think I like it

I’d seen the ads for Grammarly, a tool that promised to help me “Compose bold, clear*, mistake-free writing with Grammarly’s AI-powered writing assistant,” but I was skeptical. Maybe I didn’t want to spend the $139.95 a year it costs (there is also a $29.95 a month option.)

[* that sentence came from Grammarly’s website, and Grammarly suggested changing the word clear.]

This week I finally tried the free version, just out of curiosity, and after using it I was intrigued enough to get the paid version, and though it’s only been a few days, I like it.

I’ve been running my book through it, and while we have a lot of disagreements (primarily over Unclear Antecedents), it has found enough spelling errors I had missed, and grammar and punctuation mistakes, to make me feel that it's worth the price.

Pros

• It finds spelling mistakes and grammar issues that I missed using other tools, and with multiple proof-readings.
• It’s easy to use, though performance can sometimes be a problem (see below.)
• If you write a lot, then the yearly subscription is a good value.
• While I don’t think it dramatically improves or changes my writing, it does find errors and suggests fixes that polish the work, though I don’t always listen to it!

Cons

• About 50% of the time I’m clicking things away I disagree with, so it’s miss rate—as far as I’m concerned—is pretty high. But it’s worth it, and it’s probably better to over-suggest things than miss them.

• Some of the suggestions are completely off the wall. It suggested I change "It was a good car" to "It was a right car." It doesn't happen a lot, but it happens.

• I have run into some performance issues. After running a check it lists all the problems in a little pop-up, and you click them away or click that you want to make the suggested change. Unfortunately, I’ve found that the Mac app can be very slow to update as you click these prompts. Slow enough that you’re not sure if you clicked on it or not. I’m not sure if this is due to network issues (it is, after all, communicating with a server), the size of the files (the chapters have 10,000 words), or the age of my computer. I’ve found that it’s best to be very deliberate or you might click something you didn’t mean to.

• Finally, some of it's responses are like back-handed compliments!

Working with Indesign

There are two ways to get text into Grammarly, assuming you aren’t going to write in Grammarly, which I don’t plan to. You can paste your text into Grammarly, or you can import a file.

I had trouble checking text from an Adobe InDesign document. Yes, you shouldn’t do a grammar and word check after you layout your book, but that’s just the way it worked out. We all make mistakes.

Copying and pasting from InDesign to Grammarly and back didn’t work. The text formatting was a mess.

Exporting an RTF document from InDesign, importing it into Grammarly, then exporting the file back out to RTF and into InDesign went better, but still had formatting problems.

A solution that seems to work is to export to RTF, and then open the file in Word and save it as a .docx file. Then import that file into Grammarly, correct and export from Grammarly, and then import that resulting .docx file into InDesign (Note, Grammarly exports either RTF or .docx depending upon the file format you imported.)

This solution, so far, has worked well.

[I was not paid to write this]