This Common “Tool” Will Destroy Your Writing. Don't Believe Me? Ask Mark Twain

Be a rebel and just write the damn thing on your own

Grammarly has saved my ass many times.

My rough drafts are embarrassing. They’re full of misspelled words, sentence fragments, and filler words. I usually delete my rough drafts after I finish writing because I can’t stand to look back at them and see how bad my raw writing is.

Grammarly does a great job of catching all of that, and it’s because of that I still use it.

But Grammarly goes much further than that. It’ll recommend all types of changes to make sentences sound more positive, politically correct, and readable. Please don’t fall for it. It gets rid of your unique voice.

Your unique voice is your product.

With nearly every work I run through Grammarly, I only accept roughly half of its suggestions. That’s true on every story I’ve written that’s been boosted on Medium. The quickest way to have your work sound exactly like everyone else’s is to allow Grammarly to make every change it suggests.

I entered an excerpt from a famous Mark Twain book to drive the point home. Here’s what Grammarly thought of it.

Poor ole Mark only managed a 64/100 from the program. It also had an issue with just about every single sentence. Sorry, Mr. Twain, you’re a shit writer according to our latest technology.

Speaking of Grammarly, I noticed something else disheartening about it last week. I wrote a newsletter, from scratch like I always do. I then loaded it into Grammarly to catch the spelling errors. On a whim, I then ran it through their AI checker.

Imagine my surprise when the article I wrote showed that 39% of it was AI-generated.

This highlights an even more significant problem that Medium faces at the moment. They have to comb through millions of articles to weed out AI writing, and they’ll use a computer program similar to the one Grammarly uses.

If you write long enough on Medium, you’ll likely be caught up in its AI detection software regardless of whether or not you use AI. There’s not much you can do about that. However, it drives home the point that you must write to more than one place.

Relying on Medium alone will only set you up for a headache down the road.

Talk soon,

Josh