For this entry in the series, I give Grammarly a chance to edit its own article on “30 Common Grammar Mistakes to Avoid.” Writing about grammar is harder for software to ‘understand’, so I won’t review all 89 flags that Grammarly raised, some of which were suggestions for reducing wordiness and such, not fixing grammar. My scoring excused those parts (e.g., talking about the words as examples) that might have confused Grammarly unfairly.
Final score: -9/21
*If all suggested changes were made, the net result would be an additional 9 errors in the piece. Only 3 suggestions of 21 were correct.
Click on a heading below to see what Grammarly had to say.
Creating errors (-12)
Removing the comma would make “or any other grammar mistake” part of a series, which it is not. This clause is an aside, set apart by commas.
This is not a question. Grammarly may be assuming it is because it starts with “who.” It made this error several times (3).
The subject is singular, not plural.
Simply wrong, as the blog teams seemed to know.
Though that is commonly is a source of wordiness, omitting it here results in nonsense.
Simply make it wrong.
Because the grades “belong to” many students, the apostrophe comes after the S, which the blog post explains.
The comma is needed to separate the clauses.
The previous sentence shows the ideal. Grammarly sees the “and” then suggests a comma before it, without recognizing that “butter flour” isn’t an item and a comma is needed between those words too.
Without the comma, this sentence means that a comma should be used when the parentheses have no space around them.
Hyphenation of compound terms is done using a longer dash, an en-dash.
FINALLY, both Grammarly and their webmaster missed the period at the end of the blog post.
Missed errors (1)
The easiest fix is to replace the first and with a comma.
The blog post that Grammarly is checking here contains error samples. Grammarly missed two of them:
| My sister adopted another cat named Ghost. | The post explains this misplaced modifier implies there are two cats named Ghost. |
| Remember to dot your is. | The post explains this should be i’s. |
Neutral suggestions (3)
This analysis looks at grammar only, not suggestions for voice, clarity, or readability. The suggestions it made here are just a matter of style, not correcting errors.
A comma is not required after a short introductory phrase like this, it’s just an option.
The article is explaining that ’twas is correct. Grammarly says you can add that spelling to the dictionary.
Either spelling is correct; it depends what version of English you’re using.
Good changes (3)
Good catch!
Yes, this should have been a hyphen, not an en dash. But the blog post got the example hyphen wrong too, so maybe that was a typesetting error. (Which is the kind of thing editors look for.)
(This is one of their sample error sentences.)
Note: The term “AI” is marketing lingo applied to such software. None of it is actually AI. The software is just complex algorithms, sometimes using an enormous data-set.
