Grammarly: the Stealthy Assassin of Creativity in Writing

27 March 2026

Grammarly – the Stealthy Assassin of Creativity in Writing

Ugh but yes, I need to get another rant off my chest, so bear with me. I was supposed to write my review of Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 today, but I’m mad and need to clear my creative conduits before anything else—anything remotely good—can push its way through.

Anyone who follows me knows that not only am I creative writer with a dozen pieces published in literary journals, but I teach what I do, too: I have been a First Year Program (FYP—Composition I and II) instructor at the college level for over twelve years, on and off, as my husband’s military career permitted. Now I work as a Writing Instructor at Central New Mexico Community College, instructing FYP and, since I completed my MFA last July, Creative Writing. Community College writing instruction has been my happy place for over a decade, where I can work with students who perhaps did not envision themselves on a degree track when they completed high school, but they are returning to school, often meek and uncertain, to work their way toward the associate’s or bachelor’s that will permit them to earn more money in the workforce. It is often these students’ meekness and uncertainty that makes them the ideal for my classroom, where my focus on writing is playfulness. In-class instruction draws my students out and teaches them the value of their voice. By the end of my 15-16 weeks with these students, they step out, changed. Or—at least, they seem to.

These past few semesters, circumstances have required that I instruct online instead of in-person, and in that shift, everything changed. Without face-to-face engagement, students often fall through the cracks, never engage with classmates, or—worse—don’t realize that I am a human trying to connect with the human in them. Obviously, the invasion of Generative AI into our culture has further exacerbated this issue. Per my school’s anonymous polling, more than a whopping 90% of our students admit to employing GenAI to help them complete their schoolwork. This means that if I’m not seeing AI, it’s likely because the student is masking it—not that the student isn’t, in fact, using it. And my refusal of Generative AI in my classroom is not without merit, as you can read here in the recent Inside Higher Ed article, “Writing Faculty Push for the Right to Refuse AI.” My right (and grounds) to refuse Gen AI in my classroom are well-founded, although that is not the purpose of today’s rant.

No.

Today’s rant is about Grammarly in particular.

There was once a time in my writing instruction career that I recommended students employ Grammarly to help them learn to identify patterns of error in their grammar/writing. Oftentimes, before Generative AI’s takeover of the “writing process” (I put that term in quotes as what GenAI does is absolutely not the writing process), students submitted papers including textspeak, rife omissions of critical punctuation like periods, and missing apostrophes for contractions and possessives. Sometimes their verbs would shift from past to present, then back to past tense. Most frequently, however, I was seeing the common patterned errors of sentence fragments, comma splices, and run-ons. All three of these issues are linked, logically and grammatically, and their corrections are similar. Essentially, the student was unfamiliar with basic sentence structure (subject + predicate); therefore, errors appeared in their writing aligned with that misunderstanding. (Interestingly, since the invasion of Gen AI, I’ve seen almost none of these errors—one of the first indicators to me as an instructor of unauthorized use of AI.) The great thing about Grammarly at that time was that it always identified these fragments, comma splices, and run-ons. Always. Therefore, installing Grammarly might help my students to see where these errors were taking place in their writing. At that point, Grammarly was an excellent tool for learning sentence structure. So, until about a year and a half ago, when student writing was rife with such patterned errors, I would recommend they install Grammarly.

And then Grammarly adopted an LLM (GenAI).

Now I have flipped a full 180 on Grammarly because here’s what I’m seeing.

About two months ago, I re-installed Grammarly on my MacBook Pro because it claimed to have an AI detection tool that would be helpful to me as an instructor. Now, I don’t enjoy policing my students. I wasn’t made for confrontation, and my temperament lends itself to faith over suspicion—it’s simply healthier for my constitution. Yet my sense of justice, respect for critical thinking and the writing process, and desire for my students to actually learn something collides brutally with my resistance to becoming AI policewoman. Grammarly’s suggestion that its AI detection tool could help—well, it was seductive. So I installed it. Unfortunately, when I re-installed Grammarly on my device, it came with all of Grammarly’s dis-services, including grammar checker, punctuation checker, spell check, and the worst of all: sentence revision.

God, I’m writing this story so roundabout. Let me digress for just a second here.

About a week ago, I met with a student via Zoom about her research for an upcoming major project; she needed to learn how to use our school’s library databases to find scholarly sources. So we worked through that together and found a usable resource. At the end of our meeting, this student mentioned that she had resubmitted a previous assignment for a better grade—which is fine, as I view writing mistakes as teaching tools and writing itself as an iterative process, so I permit students to resubmit major assignments with revisions from my feedback. When I went to review that resubmission, however, I was startled by its lack of errors: always the first red flag for GenAI use. So, of course, I ran it through the school’s one permissible GenAI detector, and sure enough—BAM: 100% probability written with AI.

Now, as an instructor, when a piece of writing comes up 100% probability written with AI, I cannot know whether this means the student has shipped the entire assignment wholesale over to AI—as in, they fed the prompt directly into a Bot and then copy/pasted the output into my assignment submission area. OR. They may have simply used GenAI (an LLM) to sort of tidy up their writing. I can’t know! Obviously, one infraction is blatant and violates academic integrity; the other—maybe less so.

But here’s the sad truth: so far, zero times in the last 100 have my spidey sense plus the AI detector together been wrong. Whenever—every time—I’ve suspected AI use, I have contacted the student to meet with me to discuss their writing process, and 100% of the time the detector has proved correct. And there are sometimes students, like this particular one this week, who claim never to have touched AI in their coursework.

But then I’ll ask them if they have Grammarly installed on their system, and they say, “Yes.”

Having installed Grammarly back on my own system, let me tell you what is happening. Once the program is installed, it invades any and every program that has a writing component, from MSWord to the learning management systems (LMS) to Outlook/email. And once it appears in all these writing programs, Grammarly is insidious and pervasive. It highlights misspellings, grammar errors, and even clunky sentence structures AS YOU WRITE THEM. That is to say, sometimes it was highlighting errors in my writing before I finished writing the word or sentence. And if my sentence was a bit clunky, it would suggest a rewording. If I accepted this suggested rewording, the new sentence, grammatically perfect yet sterile, was two things:

1.     No longer my writing

2.     Flagging for Gen AI

Therefore, students like mine this week have installed a program onto their system as a “tool” to help them write without grammatical errors, and that tool is stealing their voices. Further, they do not realize that it is considered Generative AI, and they are then susceptible to punitive repercussions despite being unaware of their violation.

Part of this problem stems from writing instruction at the pre-collegiate grade levels. In middle and high school, according to my beloved student who explained this to me yesterday, English (writing) instructors will deduct big points for writing errors like comma misuse, verb mis-conjugation, and sloppy sentence structures. Those English instructors, seeing patterns of error in some of their students’ writing, may even recommend Grammarly or the so-called “writing tools” in Microsoft Word—all of which, nowadays, are powered by LLMs, although none of them are labeled as such. Thus, the student is encouraged to employ Generative AI without being warned that it is Generative AI, then sent off to college, where Generative AI is prohibited and considered an academic integrity violation.

I asked this student, “Ok, but why did you feel the need to use Grammarly in my class?” She said because she was afraid of having points deducted for errors in her writing. So I promised her that I would not deduct points for minor errors in her writing if she would stop using Grammarly. We struck a deal.

As a Creative Writer who is currently in Week 3 of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way 12-week creative recovery program, what I can tell you is that Grammarly is the stealthy assassin of creative writing. We are told by Cameron that when we create, we must eschew the critic on our shoulder. Yet that is precisely what Grammarly has become: it monitors and judges the words that flow from our fingertips before they are fully formed. It tells us our words are wrong or not-good-enough with its blaring highlights and underlines and suggestions for improvement. It screams at us that we will never be perfect, even as we are making our very best attempt at being human. There is no space for this sort of criticism within my classroom, where my students’ writing practices are just beginning to sprout and bloom. They do not need correction at this stage; per Cameron’s decree, they need encouragement alone.

I’m trying to decide how I feel about Grammarly outside of my classroom. One of my best friends, when I vented to her about this issue, said, “Well it sounds like a helpful tool.” And I did believe it was a helpful tool once upon a time, just the way I felt that Google Translate was a helpful tool for me while I lived in Madrid. But at what point does a tool become a crutch? Should we really need Grammarly to restructure and wholesale rewrite our sentences for inter-office emails and memos? Whenever you’ve noticed a typo in an email from your supervisor, have you not felt it leveled the playing field, just a little? Did it provide you with zero relief that we are all mere humans playing at the same game?

No matter what, I cannot help but believe allowing an LLM to reshape/rewrite full sentences is disingenuous to both the author and the audience, as the author is no longer representing their authentic self, and the audience is no longer receiving the author’s authentic self. I wish that every student could learn how to be a better writer the way I did, by reading a whole lot of books while being extremely sensitive to the patterns of language, then emulating those patterns on the page in my own writing; however, I know that is not a practical ask as our culture (and my students by extension) moves further and further from long-form deep reading.

Nevertheless, for now, I will take my stand: no more Grammarly in my classroom.

Full stop.