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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.
The point is that Grammarly, and most other spell checking software, ruins our ability to get into what everyone on Medium is now legally obligated to call “a flow state.” In ancient times, people referred to “a flow state” as “paying attention to what you’re doing,” but that sounds nowhere near as cool.
Writing is a form of thinking. It’s a way to clearly distill your thoughts on a subject, while simultaneously honing them and deciding what exactly it is you think about this topic.
Given the above, it should be pretty obvious that writing is much more difficult when your train of thought is being constantly interrupted—when your eyes are flitting back and forth between your cursor and the red lines manifesting all over your sentences.
You may believe that Grammarly is just helpfully catching small mistakes for you and saving you from embarrassment. I did as well when a coworker first recommended I add the browser extension. But over time I…
