Writing Tip #12: Uninstall Grammarly

A writing tip a day every day for all of 2025

Grammarly and other AI-powered self-editing tools are actually really bad for your writing, if you’re trying to be a novelist or other creative professional. These tools are pretty good at creating voiceless and bland corporate-sounding passages, but they remove all personality and soul from your writing.

I’m not even talking about generative AI, which is a whole other problem that I will likely tackle at a later time, but these are just old-school AI-powered tools that are installed on your browser or word processor to help “improve” your writing.

These tools will tell you to be more concise, more precise, more boring every single chance they get. And, listen, there’s a time a place for conciseness and precision, but dammit when I say, “I don’t hate it,” I absolutely do not mean, “I like it.”

People often tell me they use these tools because they’re not confident in their technical skills. Sometimes this is because English is their second (or third, etc) language. In those cases, I sympathize. Writing in a language other than your native tongue is hard and the temptation to rely on a cheap, easy resource must be strong.

But more often people are just… not confident. They don’t remember their junior high ELA courses or haven’t read enough or just don’t trust themselves and in those cases, you will have much better results if you just read more books and pay closer…