Sunday, March 10, 2019

Ungrammatical Grammarly

One thing I usually have to do on this blog is to remove any comment which is nothing more than an ad for the person posting the comment. There is an app called Grammarly that advertises itself as a great grammar checker. I usually don't bother to see how bad such apps are; I just know they are rotten. And I know people who pay for such an app are foolish and gullible. Recently, Grammarly posted a comment on one of my blog posts - LTA's Illiterate Poster - and it's nothing more than an advertisement for the Grammarly app. But what's really shocking is Grammarly can't even ensure that the grammar in its advertisement for its grammar checker is correct. This is what it posted in the comment section of my blog post:


The Grammarly app is advertised very aggressively on the Internet and I see ads for this app popping up in the most irritating manner everywhere and I have always suspected that it's a useless app that is unable to correct a person's language errors and my misgivings are confirmed to be justified when I read what it wrote in the 'Comment' section of my blog post. I clicked on 'Grammarly Cost' and it brought me to the Grammarly website. What it wrote on the Comment section of my blog post is just a repeat of what appears in the Grammarly website:


The ad is an embarrassment in many ways. First, the language is far from elegant. The whole ad seems to have been composed by someone who does not normally speak English. It may have been a machine which composed the whole ad. But I always ignore mere style because that's arbitrary and what's elegant to someone may not be so to another. The objective thing to do when evaluating if a grammar checker app is totally useless is to look for clear language errors and it's not hard to find them in the Grammarly ad. Look at this sentence:
But it does reflect into our writings.
What does Grammarly mean? The preceding sentence tells us how our talk is peppered with imperfect grammar. Presumably Grammarly means to say that this imperfect grammar slips into our writings as well. The verb 'reflect' does not allow for such a meaning. Another possible meaning intended by Grammarly is that bad grammar casts a bad light on our writings. If that is Grammarly's intention, then it should have used the preposition 'on' instead of 'into':
But it does reflect on our writings.
Grammarly's erroneous use of the verb or preposition (depending on what Grammarly's intended meaning is) makes it impossible for us to know what is really meant by that sentence. This is the worst kind of language error - the reader is left uncertain what Grammarly really meant to say.

What does Grammarly's app tell us? How effective is the Grammarly grammar checker if Grammarly can't even construct its sentences correctly in its own ad that promotes its grammar checker app?

I really wonder how many people use this crummy app. If Grammarly can't even get its language right on its website advertisement, how can anyone in his right mind use such an app, or worse, pay for its premium version?

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