Can Grammarly Replace a Professional Proofreader?
When it comes to Grammarly, people are in two camps about using it. Either you think it’s great and use it to check almost everything or you don’t. If there was a middle camp, that’s where you’d find me. I don’t think Grammarly is bad; I use it to triple-check my emails. However, I don’t think it’s a one-size-fits-all grammar checker.
Wondering which to use and when?
In this article, I promise to offer a balanced perspective and give you the facts so you can decide for yourself. But first, let’s break down what a proofreader is and why you may need one.
What does a professional proofreader do?
In a nutshell, professional proofreaders check for spelling, punctuation, grammar, and consistency. They make sure that your document is stylistically consistent and that every word and paragraph is formatted correctly. Proofreaders have a lot of training and writing experience. In addition to a solid command of written English, they have an eagle eye for detail and are current on the major editorial style guides. You can always count on professional proofreaders to have your typographical and grammatical back.
Who uses professional proofreaders?
Everyone who wants to make sure what they’re putting out to the world is well-written and grammatically correct. Students, doctors, authors, scientists, journalists, blog writers, marketers, and advertisers, to name a few, use professional proofreaders.
Why? They don’t want to make a costly mistake!
What do you mean by costly mistake?
Many people—including those who know better—press send before proofreading. Social media is so full of grammatical errors that Internet language has evolved as a result (something I love to talk about). Most web copy goes live without ever being reviewed by anyone other than the writer. And maybe that’s okay for some people.
But what if it isn’t?
In their article “The High Cost of Small Mistakes,” Six Degrees attributes millions of dollars businesses lose each year to typographical mistakes. They cite pricing errors as the most common form of typographical mistake. What happened to Pacific Bell Yellow Pages proves the point that a professional proofreader could have saved them $19 million. As Six Degrees explains,
In 1988, Banner Travel Services in Sonoma, California, placed an ad in the Pacific Bell Yellow Pages promoting travel arrangements to exotic destinations. A typographical mistake during the production process substituted the “x” for an “r” so that “exotic travel” became “erotic.”
The agency suffered irreversible damage to its professional reputation and lost nearly 80 percent of its customers because of the misprint.
Whether they were in a rush to get it out or looked it over themselves and thought they’d caught all the errors, we can all agree that typo hurt.
What does Grammarly do?
Grammarly is a cloud-based, artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistant that scans your writing, identifies errors, and suggests fixes. It comes in two versions: free and paid. Depending on which version you use, you’ll have access to different features:
The free version provides basic grammar, punctuation, and spell checks (performing the role of a proofreader).
Premium membership offers formatting suggestions, sentence restructuring, and includes a plagiarism detector (something a proofreader generally doesn’t do).
What’s not to like?
Privacy is a hot topic. One thing that concerns people is that Grammarly’s data is stored on servers hosted by Amazon Web Services. On the one hand, this is how Grammarly learns from its users. On the other hand, it also means that your data isn’t private.
Besides privacy, there are other things to consider:
Grammarly only follows traditional grammar and writing structures—it can’t identify modern stylistic nuances.
It has a limited dictionary and only analyzes sentences written in English—foreign language words confuse the AI.
If you put the same text in multiple times, it may give you contradictory corrections.
Then there are the technical concerns. Grammarly doesn’t catch a lot of common mistakes. For instance, it can’t distinguish between:
Homophones—words with the same sound but different spelling (there, they’re, their).
Subjunctives—Grammarly doesn’t understand the subjunctive mood that expresses hypothetical situations and outcomes (wishes, hopes, or desires). In “I wish it were Friday,” the verb “were” is in the subjunctive mood.
Additionally, Grammarly is a machine-learning AI that has to see thousands of iterations of something to understand how to identify it. It learns as people use it, which means it’s only as good as the people using it.
When to use Grammarly
Grammarly is handy for everyday use if you want a quick once-over on shorter pieces of writing, like checking emails. It can help you identify where to reword your sentences and what tone you may be using.
When to use a professional proofreader
Of course, you can use a professional proofreader for anything you write. However, when it comes to more extended pieces meant for wider consumption—articles, books, educational or scientific papers, or contracts—nothing can beat a professional proofreader.
Comparing what a professional proofreader provides with Grammarly’s AI writing system is like comparing apples to oranges. While they both check for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors; how they do it is different. One offers a personal touch, the other uses algorithms and AI. One keeps your content private and confidential, and the other stores it in the cloud.
As you’ve seen with what happened to Banner Travel Services, mistakes can be costly. And even if they had run their content through Grammarly, the errors wouldn’t have been caught.
As useful as Grammarly is, computers have a long way to go before they can replace the value of a human proofreader. If you’re ready for that in-depth check before you publish, you’re ready for a professional proofreader.
