What is Grammarly and How Can It Be Used to Teach? Tips

(Image credit: Grammarly)

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This article was updated in July 2024

Grammarly is a popular writing tool that checks for spelling and grammar errors, offers additional advice to improve writing, and features a new generative AI writing assistant.

As a professional writer, I find it serves as a helpful “second pair of eyes,” frequently catching wrong or poor word choices and awkward phrasings in my work. I also recommend it for my writing students because I think it can help them improve their writing – though as with any tech-based writing assistant, it’s not perfect and will miss mistakes, or on rare occasions, provide recommendations that I don’t agree with from a stylistic perspective. That’s also true of its AI features, which are dazzling when working well but can also provide inaccurate information and sometimes offers to do the writing for a student, which is obviously not ideal.

Grammarly has a robust free version available as well as education-specific plans.

Here’s everything you need to know about Grammarly.

What is Grammarly?

Grammarly is a cloud-based AI-powered writing assistant. It checks for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, as well as writing clarity and delivery mistakes. Users can also customize their Grammarly tool to account for their desired style and tone. Grammarly also has a generative AI tool that can help make writing suggestions and offer more advanced rewrites.

Grammarly is available to download for desktops, as a browser extension, and a keyboard plugin. It is available as an MS Office Plug-in and a Google Docs browser extension, and as an ios app for iPhones and iPads.

Grammarly was founded in 2009 in Ukraine by Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmytro Lider, and though much of its operations are now based in North America, it has maintained an office in Kyiv and has donated millions to the ongoing Ukrainian defense.

What’s New With Grammarly?

The biggest new edition to Grammarly is its generative AI writing assistant. If you open the Grammarly app, this assistant will provide detailed writing suggestions on first drafts, help with brainstorming, and more.

I recently reviewed this feature in-depth and found it really impressive at times — it is capable of offering detailed and caring feedback that is similar to what I or another instructor might offer. However, it also has some issues with accuracy, and has a tendency to provide examples of what a student could write that some students might be tempted to copy and paste. So use this feature with your students with caution, stressing the importance of using it as a tool to help you write, not one to write for you.

Less recently, but still relatively new, is Grammarly’s ability to generate automated citations. I know some instructors will disagree with this, but I’m happy to outsource the minutiae of citation generation to Grammarly, and happy for my students to do that as well.

What Are Grammarly’s Best Features?

I have found Grammarly to be better at catching homophones than other spell-checkers. For instance, Grammarly almost always finds there/their or are/our typos.

Grammarly can help remind students to write in an active voice, and offers quick but helpful explanations of the changes it has made. Additionally, Grammarly’s Google plug-in automatically checks everything you write, helping eliminate potentially embarrassing typos or mistakes in emails, on web forms, etc.

Recent upgrades to Grammarly are geared toward students. The paid version of the tool, now checks for common citation formatting errors, instantly proofreading the formatting of in-line and bibliography citations and highlighting incorrect use of commas, parentheses, and ampersands.

All Grammarly users now have the option to use an automatic citation creation tool, which allows students to create a one-click citation from tens of millions of articles.

Grammarly’s new AI feature can also provide students with helpful writing tips if they ask it to read their work and make suggestions. While I have some complaints with this tool overall, this feature provides some of the best examples of helpful generative AI education assistance I’ve seen.

Grammarly's citation tool in action — (Image credit: Grammarly)

How Much Does Grammarly Cost?

Grammarly has a robust free program that offers advanced grammar and spell-checking, plus allows for 100 prompts with the AI assistant.

Premium subscription plans are $12 per month if you pay with a year’s subscription, or $30 per month if you pay monthly. Premium plans offer additional features such as plagiarism-checking and the ability to have Grammarly’s AI rewrite full sentences. Users also get up to 1,000 AI prompts per month.

In addition, Grammarly offers education-specific plans, but school administrators need to contact Grammarly directly for price quotes.

Grammarly Tips & Tricks

Have Students Log Words They Commonly Get Wrong

Grammarly can be a great tool to help encourage students to look critically at their work. Ask them to write a list of all the words Grammarly highlighted in the initial draft of their paper, which can help raise awareness of their common mistakes with words and phrases.

Remind Students That It’s Okay to Disagree with Grammarly

Tools such as Grammarly have been criticized for pushing conformity in writing. I like to discuss style and unique voice with my students and encourage them to “know the rules, so they can learn when they intentionally want to break them.” Encouraging students to discuss why they ignored certain Grammarly advice can be a good teachable moment.

Utilize Grammarly’s Explanations

Grammarly’s blog is loaded with great writing resources and explanations about grammar. The simple-to-follow conversational tone can be more enjoyable for students to read and easier for them to understand than an explanation you might find in a textbook. I’ll frequently assign these short blog posts and will also recommend specific posts to specific writers when I’m reading their work. For instance, if a student is struggling with comma usage, I might put this link in a comment on their work.

Experiment With Grammarly’s AI

Like many AI tools, Grammarly’s AI tool offers better feedback with better prompts. So play around with the tool to see what type of language gets the best results. I found that getting as specific as possible can be helpful. I used phrases such as: “Can you read this paper and make sure it accomplishes X and Y?”

Experimenting can also be a good AI literacy lesson. What does Grammarly’s AI do well? What needs work?

Correction: 9/20/22

The original version of this story incorrectly implied that Grammarly Editor was only available in paid versions of the tool.

Erik Ofgang is a Tech & Learning contributor. A journalist, author and educator, his work has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Smithsonian, The Atlantic, and Associated Press. He currently teaches at Western Connecticut State University’s MFA program. While a staff writer at Connecticut Magazine he won a Society of Professional Journalism Award for his education reporting. He is interested in how humans learn and how technology can make that more effective.