Is the Grammar and Spellchecker Worth Paying For?

As an international freelance writer, I’ve been using Grammarly’s free option for over a year to catch typos, misplaced punctuation, and silly mistakes like repeated words and non-U.S. spelling. Grammarly’s advertising on YouTube finally piqued my interest in the premium plan, which is where the idea for this review came from.

Grammarly’s free tier offers spelling and grammar checks under the guise of “Correctness” and checks your writing for unnecessary complications under the “Clarity” label. Once you’ve finished running Grammarly’s basic check, you’ll be notified that there are “additional writing issues” that include the choice of words, use of punctuation, wordiness, tone, and more.

As a free user, you’re left to wonder what could have been. You’ll see your scores within the assistant, including overall scores out of 100 and ratings for clarity, engagement, delivery, and overall correctness. You won’t see nuanced suggestions about reaching your writing goals until you upgrade.

As a free tool, Grammarly works predictably well at catching mistakes. This includes misplaced punctuation, typos, and homophones. Grammarly adds a capable grammar and spellchecker wherever you type, whether you’re authoring a lengthy forum post or an email to your boss.

Beyond this, the free plan offers limited enhancements to your writing. Cutting down on verbosity seems to be Grammarly’s main benefit for free users outside of simple spelling and punctuation checking. Phrases like “are able to” are frequently corrected to “can,” and whole sentences can be rephrased to remove half of the (admittedly unnecessary) words.

Grammarly Premium provides much more feedback about your writing. You’ll get access to a whole suite of additional suggestions, mostly relating to your tone, improving engagement, and delivery. You’ll get a lot of sentence rewrite suggestions, alternative word suggestions, tone tweaks to make your writing sound more positive or confident, and offers to shuffle your sentences around in a way that Grammarly thinks sound better.

This makes using Grammarly Premium a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, you’re potentially improving the readability of your writing and achieving your desired outcome in terms of tone. On the other, you’re seeing far more interruptions and spending more time editing your writing than you would with the basic free tier.

You can upgrade to Grammarly Premium for $30 per month, which drops to $12 per month if you sign up for an entire year (a total cost of $144 upfront). It’s hard to recommend the tool for the full $30 monthly, but it’s much easier to stomach at $12. To see the value in such an investment, you’ll need to do a lot of writing or be someone who uses Grammarly’s suggestions really improve whatever documents they work on.

For me, enabling Premium made editing a far more in-depth process. I spent more time editing my work since I had more suggestions to scroll through. Though I appreciate Grammarly catching my mistakes and inefficient verbiage, I found the full gamut of suggestions to be a little overwhelming. Editing an article down took longer, and many of the suggestions were things that I ended up discarding.

For example, word variety is something you’ll see a lot more of when you upgrade to Grammarly Premium. While writing an article about Discord “tokens,” the app consistently tried to get me to change “token” to a different word, like “receipt,” which made no sense in the context of the article. You can’t necessarily tell the variety suggestion to ignore a specific word; it’s all or nothing. You can turn variety off or leave it on and field the same bad suggestions throughout the whole body of writing.

That’s not to say there aren’t many benefits to Grammarly Premium, like passive voice warnings. The tool won’t always rewrite your sentence in the active voice, but it does highlight instances of passive voice so that you can improve the overall result. It’s also possible that Grammarly will “train” you to ditch some of your bad habits by constantly drawing attention to them.

As someone who writes articles like this one for a living, I didn’t find too much value in Grammarly’s ability to make tone suggestions. I had mixed feelings about a piece of software potentially removing voice from my articles, which made me wonder if Grammarly Premium may be better suited to formal and academic settings.

It’s worth adding that Grammarly is fairly customizable, both in terms of a personal dictionary and different writing styles. You can enable or disable features like consistent capitalization, standardized citation styles, and specific tone suggestions. I was particularly impressed with Grammarly’s inclusion of inclusive language checkers that check for gender biasing, potentially ableist language, and other language that could alienate your audience.

Sometimes, Grammarly makes poor suggestions. The tool could be better with technical jargon, so if you’re writing for a tech blog and using terms that the tool isn’t familiar with, you may see some humorous or just plain wrong correction suggestions. Like any such tool, you’ll need to scrutinize any suggestions, but you can at least add words to a personal dictionary to stop repeated attempts at corrections.

The tool has a fairly rigid outlook on how sentences should be constructed. The rules around how Grammarly wants certain words and punctuation to be used don’t always gel, which can leave you second-guessing. Thankfully, you don’t have to accept every one of Grammarly’s suggestions, but sometimes it can feel like you’re fighting the tool rather than making good use of it.

Grammarly also seems to dislike some words and phrasing. For example, “really” is a word that Grammarly (and many writers) hates, which is fine, but there are instances where its use is appropriate (like when stressing a point in an informal context). Grammarly also seems to dislike the word “own,” correcting statements like “create your own Discord bot” to “create your Discord bot” instead, which doesn’t read correctly.

How you use Grammarly can make a big difference too. You can install plugins and browser extensions so that Grammarly is always active, working as you type to improve your writing as you go. I find it distracting to have an app constantly try and correct me. It interferes with the flow of my writing, so my primary use for Grammarly is as a failsafe after I’ve written and proofread my work. I typically do this by pasting text into the fairly decent Grammarly editor.

With Premium enabled, you’ll spend a lot more time in this environment fielding suggestions that, at least for the context in which I write, often feel like they don’t make a huge difference to the end result.