The answer to this question is No. The Use of Grammarly is not cheating. Before we explore this issue in detail, it is important to understand what Grammarly is since not every student may be aware of its existence.
Grammarly can be regarded as an online tool that helps students to professionally edit their assignments or papers before submission. On top of helping students edit their work, it gives students good suggestions that are meant to make the sentences concise, clearer, and easier to read.
From this, you can now understand why there is a debate whether the use of Grammarly should be considered cheating or not. It gives students a real advantage over students who are not aware of its existence or usage.
Students who have used Grammarly report better grades. There is a free version of Grammarly that students can use to test the practicability of Grammarly.
Is Using Grammarly Cheating?
As aforementioned, the answer to this question is a bit obvious as cheating is something not associated with Grammarly. In fact, most teachers, professors, and universities do encourage students to use Grammarly.
Using Grammarly is not considered cheating because it only aids in proofreading and does not provide students with suggestions on what to write or answers to type.
It also does not give suggestions to get higher grades. After all, Grammarly cannot make automatic changes to the paper hence, not cheating.
The first reason is that Grammarly only points out the sentences that should be edited to make them clearer. It also provides advice on spelling and grammar changes that can improve the paper.
As an online tool, Grammarly cannot provide you with answers to the assignment questions and it does not guarantee clean or perfect grammar every time.
As such, it is evident that the use of Grammarly cannot qualify as cheating.
To make this issue clear, Grammarly does not know the answer to your questions.
Its algorithm is only capable of giving suggestions on how to make your writing clearer and understandable.
Furthermore, Grammarly’s algorithm cannot think on students’ behalf. As such, if you are using Grammarly and it has given you suggestions, if you do not respond to them, the application will not make the changes.
It is your decision to make the changes.
In addition, when using Grammarly, you have not paid anyone to write the paper for you. Some college students hire essay writers from essay writing services and this is considered cheating.
When using Grammarly, you will be editing your work and no writer will be helping you. Therefore, it makes the use of Grammarly honest.
How to Use Grammarly Well to Polish Essays
Grammarly is a very important and pragmatic tool to be used when editing essays. The first step in using Grammarly to polish your essays is to open a Grammarly account. You may choose the free or premium account.
It should be noted that the free account will not provide detailed suggestions but only errors in punctuation, spelling, and simple phrasing or wording.
The premium version allows students to make more changes to the document because it has premium suggestions.
The premium version will also check for plagiarism.
The second step is to upload your essay into the online application.
You cannot use Grammarly when offline.
When using the tool, make sure that you have an uninterrupted internet connection. You can either upload the document as a file from your computer or you can copy-paste the text into Grammarly.
Once you have uploaded or copy-pasted your paper, a popup window will appear with more suggestions concerning the parameters of editing. There will be writing tone, professional level, audience, and so on.
You should select the editing options or parameters based on the type of paper, the topic, and the target audience. Once you are done with this, Grammarly will highlight all the errors within your text on the left side of the screen and suggestions on the right side of the screen.
You should read the whole document to make sure that the suggestions are correct. At times, they do not make sense. To agree to a suggestion, just click on the highlighted word, phrase, or sentence, and it will be changed.
Grammarly will also be rating the overall score of your paper, with 100% being perfect work and 0% being extremely poor work. Make sure that your work has a score of more than 80%.
Once you are done with editing, you can highlight the edited work and copy-paste it into your document-generating software such as Microsoft Word.
Advantages/Benefits of Using Grammarly
The first advantage or benefit of using Grammarly is that your work will sound and feel professional even when you are not capable of producing such work.
Grammarly can be very helpful to bloggers, copywriters, and content marketers, authors, instructors, or academics who are interested in detecting plagiarism in students’ papers, and business professionals tasked with coming up with accurate presentations, reports, social media posts, or emails.
Students and anyone writing using English can produce significantly better papers when they use Grammarly.
The second advantage of using Grammarly is plagiarism checking.
If you purchase the premium version and pay the subscription fees, you will not only have access to premium editing suggestions but also access to plagiarism-checking tools. What this means is that your paper will be free from errors and plagiarism.
The third advantage is that the premium version of Grammarly is not that expensive. And using Grammarly is worth it because the features it offers are helpful and reflect the monthly payment.
The monthly subscription cost is $30, with quarterly subscriptions costing $19.98 monthly, which is billed as a single payment of $59.95. An annual subscription is $11.66 monthly, which is billed as a single payment of $139.95.
If you cannot afford the premium version of Grammarly, you can always use the free version. However, you will not access premium services such as plagiarism-checking and advanced suggestions.
Disadvantages of Grammarly
The major disadvantage of Grammarly is that it does not offer the feedback or context of the corrections/suggestions like a human would. The suggestions are provided by an algorithm that tends to be robotic.
Grammarly can also make suggestion errors especially when a sentence contains a word that is not in its dictionary. Grammarly is good for shorter works. However, use human proofreaders or editors for longer works such as novels.
Finally, you will need to pay for premium services. the free version doesn’t offer a lot hence the reason why you should purchase the premium version to enjoy the service.
The Grammarly ad lyrics are pretty clear on all the benefits you get for the money. Check it out and learn if it is reflective.
Joseph is a freelance journalist and a part-time writer with a particular interest in the gig economy. He writes about schooling, college life, and changing trends in education. When not writing, Joseph is hiking or playing chess.