I have considered using Grammarly but do not wish to be drawn into something that might steal my ideas, or milk me for more money than is reasonable. Does anyone have experience with them?
Gwen
Is Grammarly Safe?
A word from our sponsor:
BigCloset TopShelf
TopShelf TG Fiction in the BigCloset!
The Hatbox
Checks can be made out & sent to:
Joyce Melton
1001 Third St.
Space 80
Calimesa, CA 92320
USA
Note: $6000 is the operating, maintenance and upgrade budget. Amounts received in excess of the $6000 will be applied to long term debt accrued over the last 19 years.
If you prefer, you can donate through Patreon:
Become a Patron!
Thank you!
Comments
I do
I use both the paid desktop version and the free online version. No problems except when they update, it sometimes takes a day or so to stop acting flakey.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
A few days is easy
I've been trying for over seven decades to stop acting flaky with marginal success..
Love, Andrea Lena
Same here
I use the free desktop version and don't have any qualms about using it.
It does make you think about how many time you use words like 'really' and words ending in 'ily' in your text.
Some of the things it thinks are redundant are a bit screwy but nothing is perfect.
I don't pay for it so why should it milk money from you? Of course, they'd like you to pay for the extra features but you don't have to.
Samantha
English do not use Contractions?
My MS Word throws a fit if I try to use them. Then I discovered that the Grammar preference is set to English English. I do not object to that. I likely set it that way when I bought it. In one story I wrote, I did my best to use the Queen's English, oh just because I wanted to. I grew up in a poor Oklahoma Family whose English was deeply accented. I have tried to get rid of that as soon as I left home.
In English English
We British use lots of contractions, that said, at school we are taught to not use them when writing. There are several reasons, using full words encourages better spelling and grammar, there is no ambiguity regarding the intention/understanding of the reader and of course the full words are recognised by everyone (even if they are 2nd language readers).The convention is that this 'formal' English is used in official documents, letter writing, instructions, news papers etc.
Contractions are of course used in everyday conversation and that is where they are used in writing, the main text of a book etc will be in formal, speech will be vernacular - if it isn't it comes out as forced and un natural. For example "we cannot go to the beach" is correct but sounds 'off' but "we can't go the beach" is exactly how most of the population will say it. Of course this can get more complicated, a Scot may well say "we canna gae t' the beach" - more contractions and 'dialect/accent' - it really is a morass!
For what its worth, so called 'Queens English' has changed over the years to include contractions, the main difference to 'street' language is the use of clear diction
MS Word and Office don't automatically pick up contractions which is actually good, however if you use them a lot in your writing you can add them to 'your' dictionary - you lose the double check but avoids can't being highlighted fifty times a chapter!
My issue with Grammarly is that any idiot can use it, it does not teach good grammar or sentence structure and will lose any subtleties to produce its bland, formal result. Any student using it should lose marks straightaway.
We may not all be English wizards and spell and grammar checking software is very useful if you aren't so good at spellin', just don't use it as a crutch, try to improve your dictionary, sentence form etc.
Madeline Anafrid Bell
Registers
Grammarly has settings for different registers: formal, informal and neutral. Different audiences: general, academic, literary. Different goals: information, friendship, storytelling. And more settings than these, even moods like optimistic, urgent or analytical. It doesn't have to be set to produce bland text. And it even can learn my quirks, like I use an Oxford comma with a list containing compound nouns but not with simple ones.
It's a tool. I reject its suggestions slightly more often than I accept them, but it helps me find places where I have used too many adverbs or not enough content words. It's got failures, it can't seem to track pronouns across paragraph boundaries and it thinks own is always redundant, but it is a good tool if used well.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Define 'safe'. If you mean
Define 'safe'. If you mean "Can they transmit my words to their central servers and parse through them?" The answer is certainly. If it's "Will they read my words and act upon them?" The answer is almost certainly not.
It's like I tell my customers. I host their email. I _could_ read through their emails if I really wanted to, but why in the world would I want to waste my time like that? I only investigate emails when requested. (For example, to find where a customer moved the 'super important' email that they were 'just reading'. )
For Grammarly, they may have some automatic uploads, but it's probably when you keep giving it similar sounds over and over that you keep correcting, or that it just can't figure out at all. Like in the deep south, the word 'Getonoutofhere' - which has three syllables. Sometimes just one. In that case, I suspect they'll get 10 or 15 seconds for someone to review. If they have a phone/tablet app, it probably uploads to a central processor - that's how my Google Voice to Text works on my cellular phone. If I have a lousy data connection, I can't use it.
I'd be more concerned about having an Alexa, or Google whatsit, sitting in your living room.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
I use Grammarly both as a
I use Grammarly both as a keyboard on my mobiles and the paid desktop version. It works very nicely. They will actually check your documents for plagiarism if you wish, so it would be rather hypocritical for them to copy your writing.
Hugs!
Rosemary
I've Used for Years
No problems.
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
A Change Of Literary "Voice".
I do not wish to start a new blog so I will simply tell you that I'm changing the subject slightly. Sometimes reading one of my old stories can generate a new one. In "Katia in Afghanistan" I tried write British. Thankfully those from over there were quite kind to me about it.
I was surprised when I started to read "Alien Investigators" that my voice was very different from usual. Part of that was in my using my interpretation of "Mormonize" perhaps. I held that dialect through the whole story. For me, writing that was fun.
is gram marly safe...
...or will it suggest the writer removes nuances and intended ungramaticisms leaving a text of perfectly sterile A.I. webspeak or should that be web-right¿
アンその他
Decisions
So what if it recommends you remove intended ungrammaticisms? You can't expect it to be a mind-reader. If it offers to castrate your prose, you don't have to let it. It's a tool, not a dominatrix.
And this has nothing to do with being SAFE, which is a reference to how it stores and processes user data.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
not a dominatrix.
And shepherds are nice friendly people who like to help sheep without any ulterior motive.
Training writers minds little by little suggesting what is right or wrong is a real danger. Writing is a creative art and should not be railroaded by social construct
アンその他
Responsibility
People need to accept responsibility for their use of tools. Imputing an absurd motive to the programmers of Grammarly is not doing anyone any particular good. I recommend Grammarly to anyone who wants a tool to help improve their writing by making self-editing less painful and more efficient. I don't recommend anyone accept all of Grammarly's suggestions.
Writing is a creative art--about social constructs, in large part.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Who’d a thought it
I did not imagine that anyone would so nieve as to believe that AI did not use human input as a learning tool.
アンその他
Grammarly is not an
Grammarly is not an artificial intelligence. It is a neural learning network, to a degree, yes. That is not an intelligence. It is a probability generator. If you have an excellent grasp of both grammar and spelling, then you likely do not need a tool such as Grammarly. If you have a poor grasp of spelling or grammar (by the way, the word is 'naive'.), then Grammarly can be very helpful, especially as a first run-through editing tool. It is no more manipulating you than handing your work to a friend, relative, or teacher for review would be. Less so, because Grammarly doesn't have opinions as such - it just goes by a strict set of rules.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
You are absolutely right. It
You are absolutely right. It is however exactly the same as painting by numbers.
Those artists don’t have to stay within the lines either. They could also choose to think for themselves.
Here in the birthplace of the English language I can assure nieve is exactly what I intended to write without any assistance from t’interweb.
アンその他
You say I'm right, then
You say I'm right, then immediately say I'm wrong. I sense a discordance there.
As I said - this is _exactly_ the same as asking someone to review your work. Nobody forces you to use what Grammarly - or your teacher - suggests. You may, however, find that your grades suffer if you refuse to follow the rules, especially as laid down by the teacher.
And, I'm sorry, the word _is_ naive. 'nieve' is from Middle English, and is an almost never used word (feminine) for hand, or perhaps fist. Claiming that because you're where English came from (Saxony?, or just Northern Europe) doesn't make it correct to invent new spellings that conflict with existing words.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
____?
Love the way you pretend not to understand _very_amusing
Very well googled typo, thank you for explaining what I meant.
I hope you continue to enjoy writing wevver by numbers ornot and playing with underscore
end of
アンその他
https://www.nordicnames.de
https://www.nordicnames.de/wiki/Hnefi
Have fun with your inability to utilize a dictionary or a thesaurus.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Being a terrible speller
I have come to rely on a large printed dictionary. Looking in it, naive is listed, "Simple in a childlike or, sometimes, foolish way; innocent; not experienced."
OTOH, nieve is not listed at all
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” - Turkish Proverb
It's not listed there because
It's not listed there because you'd only run into it if you liked reading Chaucer in the original Middle English, plus older eddas. Even so, it appears to have been one of the various compound letter words. (where you see OE or AE smashed together). Most of those words have had the letters turned into one of the nominal 27 letters of the alphabet. (yes, I did type 27. It turns out that until after the early 1900's, the alphabet was taught, ending with 'wxyz&'. "w, x, y, z, and per se and'. (am-per-sand) Prior to that, there were the OE and AE 'letters' as well. They've been simplified down to the 26 that are considered standard today)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
I confuse the hell out of it!
I use Grammarly but to be honest it is a help to me mainly for spelling. As well as being deaf I'm also dyslexic as for organization etc it gets confused. As does my editor and soundboard when I write. I'm originally from Boston Mass or should I say Bawstawn lol? I've lived in the UK for several years now and my kids are Brits so my writing is very much a mixture of the two. Yes, I do make a lot of contractions when I write plus my sentence construction is different from most. Like most deaf people I write as I would sign but I have it set for American English same as my word program. In answer to your question yes I would say it's perfectly safe.
Cheryl XX