Stop Using Grammarly
You’ll fly higher without it.
In A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the machines on the spaceship Heart of Gold are programmed with Genuine People Personalities. These personalities run the gamut from the deeply depressed—Marvin the Paranoid Android—to the manically chipper—the ship’s central computer.
Neither are particularly pleasant to be around, but it’s the boundless need to help that makes the ship’s computer so agonizing to interact with.
“Hi there!” it said brightly and simultaeneously spewed out a tiny ribbon of ticker tape just for the record. The ticker tape said, Hi There!
“Oh God,” said Zaphod. He hadn’t worked with this computer for long but had already learned to loathe it.
The central computer in Hitchhiker’s comes to mind quite often when I am writing using Grammarly. Much like the ship’s computer, Grammarly only has one speed—obnoxiously helpful. It gurgles and burbles away, offering cheerful, bright red lines at the least opportune moments. Bright red, by the way, being a color we have evolved to find visually arresting; a color that sets off alarm bells deep in our lizard brains, yelling at us to stop, shift our focus, and check out whether we may have misspelled “imbecile.” We did, but that is not the point.
