Contrarian Grammarian

Edison's electric pen.

For the last year or more I've been using AI driven grammar bots to help me improve my writing. All I really wanted was something to fix typos, correct comma usage, or guide me when I accidentally change point of view or tenses. Most of the corrections suggested by such AI agents at Grammarly or Evernote are helpful. Actually not Evernote. Evernote is an application whose AI is so dim as to offer "Amurican" spellings despite having set my dictionary choices as "Canadian English". While the application allows words like "labour" and "colour", the bot automatically suggests "labor" and "color" and makes such changes without consulting me at all. If I were an editor and Evernote was my assistant, they'd be gone. Eighty-sixed. Dismissed. Fired. Given a dishonourable discharge.

One thing that has always bothered me about spell-checkers and grammar assistants is how they insist that everyone write the same way. It's very difficult to write in an almost casual informal tone with these pearl-clutching old biddies telling you that what you are writing simply isn’t said in polite society. If I had wanted Ms. Gillingham from my seventh grade English class to write my post, I would've gone through the trouble to dig her up and re-animate the old soul, Frankenstein style. But I didn't and I won't, because that kind of thing isn’t done in polite society.

I remember a David Foster Wallace essay, Tense Present, referencing SWE, or standard written English (or as it was sometimes referred to as Standard White English), and making the case to his class about how they should approach their essay writing. I may be misremembering it, but his point was more about aiming to write this way at college as that is how you will be judged. When writing creatively for yourself or your audience, there are plenty of arguments to abandon that style. I use the word, "style", loosely here because there's still a case for grammatical correctness. It's also important to at least be consistent in how you use punctuation, quotations and the like for clarity. Yet, (there's an even a reason I use "yet" rather than "but" to begin a sentence, but I digress) if you want to sound loose, conversational or natural in text, I'm not sure being grammatically correct is always necessary. It's also true what we say in spoken terms, can be unclear in written text. My point is that if you want to convey a story or idea in your own voice or style, then these AI grammar agents are not here to help you, but hinder you. Knowing how these AI agents are "trained" by being fed reams and reams of existing text, it's not surprising they seek to make any one person's writing sound like everybody else's.

Grammarly really seems to hate sentences like this one, and would prefer it be written as, "Grammarly, doesn't prefer sentences such as this." Don't get me wrong. I'm all in on the approach of taking a scalpel to any paragraph, Orwellian-style or perhaps, like Hemingway, butchering through florid words to arrive at the best cut, but I don't want to sound like Orwell or Hemingway. If I did, I would be a grammar-bot called Orwell or Hemingway or maybe, cutely, Orwellingway. Grammarly particularly despises my overuse of the words, "really", "simply", "just", or "actually". It loathes phrases, "it's like", "sort of", or "kind of". I understand, but I'm not using it to make me sound like someone smarter, I simply just don't really like how it's trying to force me to write (see what I did there?). I do want guidance on spelling, comma use, hyphenation and punctuation. I appreciate that I overuse some words and phrases and try to make amends as needed. Grammarly doesn't see it that way. Grammarly wants to break you like a wild mustang and make you into the milquetoast dweeb it imagines you to be. One thing Grammarly strictly adheres to is a very narrow use of the "Oxford comma", which to be fair, makes Grammarly look old and stupid. Despite having a fetish for commas, a lot of these bots won't recognize sentences that get punctuation inserted accidentally as when happens if you are using keyboard shortcuts while the cursor is still in the editing field, and you end up with a ".;" or ",.:". These wayward dots are ignored and you are made to look like a fool.

For all its librarian fascistic zeal against words I love, the main reason I would never subscribe to Grammarly is that it does not, and cannot, fathom our hybridized Canadian spellings. Mind you, this isn't a Grammarly hit piece. Evernote's AI assistant is so bad it's like having a five-year-old correct your paper on Nietzsche. Do not get me started on Microsoft Word's absolute obsession with "passive tense". Mostly there's no need to pay for this functionality separately as many of the primary functions of these services will soon be incorporated into any writing application (like, really, really soon - OK, at this point I am trying to break Grammarly's little fake brain).

How can Grammarly be such a contrarian? The actual name of the app is entirely invented nonsense, which is another thing I kind of hate (again, just me poking the AI grammar bear). There is the general disdain for fun invented words. When I see the dotted red underline in most apps, I think, "Whoopsy, typo!", or I'm unsure of how a word is spelled, so it is helpful to correct it. Again, none of these apps like it if you switch up spelling the way we often do. As a Canadian, I accept the word "centre" as one that means a building or organization, and "center" as the mathematical middle. It may be technically incorrect, but also completely fine if I stick to my inventive grammar guns. Please refrain from reading a fuel meter, if you wish to know how many more metres you can travel. I'm really speaking to those fun, playful terms like I am currently engaged in, such as "hurkle-durkle" (writing this from Fowler's position in bed). Another word I use with frequency is "cack", which I usually use in technology to mean something stopped suddenly, without reason or died unexpectedly, as in "My hard drive just cacked.", "That script cacked, dude.", or "I hope it doesn't cack this time." Apparently, this word doesn't exist.

It feels like the little grammar robots are trying to take the fun out of writing rather than take out the hard stuff so that writing can be more fun. Maybe it's asking too much for a robot to understand playfulness and word play, but it does feel too much for me to abide by their, "we are not amused" algorithms. It is strange that at a time when I can ask ChatGPT to write a nursery rhyme in the voice of Shakespeare, that it's a struggle to ask a bot to leave me alone and let me write in my own voice. Take note, these bots also would edit out emphasis like, "my own". I say, to thine own self be true, just like Bill Shakespeare wrote.