Grammarly Can Eat My Shorts

I am human, therefore I write like one.

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

Until a few months ago, I had never heard of Grammarly. But here on Medium, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a reference to the writing improvement app (author’s note: I would never swing a dead cat. How did that even become a saying? Was there ever a craze for swinging dead cats? Was it a fad, like fidget spinners? Did everybody carry around a dead cat, casually swinging it as they went about their day, wishing they had more room to really wind up and give it a good spin without always hitting something?).

But I digress. According to Wikipedia:

Grammarly is an app that automatically detects potential grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, and style mistakes in writing, following common linguistic prescription. Grammarly’s algorithms flag potential issues in the text and suggest context-specific corrections for grammar, spelling, wordiness, style, punctuation, and plagiarism.

Every time I see the word algorithm, something deep down in my lizard brain goes on high alert. Algorithm is a robot word. It is cold, it is hard. Algorithms have no…