By Madhu Shree Dwivedi
This review was written in June 2018 during the author's Modlingua internship.
Grammarly is an extensive, friendly and useful application of artificial intelligence in corporate life, academics and day-to-day work, thanks to its easy, unencumbered accessibility. Its usefulness shows most clearly in making content perfect and presentable in a very short period of time.
My own test: a 6,000-word seminar paper
During my post-graduation, I had the good fortune of presenting a paper on India and West Asia in the contemporary global world - around 6,000 words - at an international seminar. For this academic adventure, the credit goes squarely to Grammarly, which proved to be a boon after I downloaded it online, free of cost. The skeleton, blood and flesh of the paper were mine; Grammarly provided the polish and perfectibility that made it acceptable everywhere. It was like the salt that added flavour and taste to the dish. The paper was lengthy at first, but it was pruned under subheadings to meet the word limit without compromising the comprehensive checks and corrections Grammarly performed.
What the tool offers
Grammarly has different functions in its premium and unpaid versions. It lets you set goals so it understands the context of your writing - intent, audience, style, emotion and domain - and gives better suggestions accordingly. Its plagiarism option acts like a sieve, pointing out copied content in a document.
In the unpaid version, I fully used options such as spelling, correction of wrong, inappropriate and confused words, capitalization, and common grammar usage and conventions, including dialect conventions and spacing. It checks common grammar - prepositions, nouns, verb voice, conjunctions, modifiers - along with word reference and sentence syntax. For the abstract of my paper, which had to be submitted within 400 words and in very little time, I can convincingly say that with Grammarly I produced a decent, flawless version by weeding out the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes in under ten minutes.
Exploring the application further, I found it also offers a professional proofreader. And there is no need to write your content inside Grammarly for correction - you can simply copy and paste, and the correction is done, which saves a great deal of time and energy. It is very helpful when someone with real expertise and command of the language is not around.
A word of caution
Yet, for all its quality of correction and modification, the tool can also paralyse a user's own analysing skills. At present, many people are growing dependent on such applications and follow them blindly, without a second thought, stultifying their own innovative and creative ability to think. Whenever you do any kind of online work with Grammarly installed, it automatically flags the errors in your document - write an email, and the mistakes appear at once. Used with judgement it is a mirror for self-correction; used without it, it becomes a crutch.
