“Grammarly can help” is a phrase that every student knows well, and most are tired of hearing and seeing it. I know I am. If you don’t know what Grammarly is, you’ve probably been severely disconnected from the internet and we need to catch you up on some more important historical events that have happened in the last year or two since the extension released its newer loud and repetitive commercials. 

If you seriously don’t know what it is or have just heard of it and never used it, Grammarly is a useful tool that you can download as a browser extension that corrects spelling and grammatical errors on any website that you type on (if it supports the extension). I personally use it on pretty much everything that I have to write, and it has saved me so much time sifting through my writing and making sure I have spelled everything correctly. One thing that is really annoying about it, though, is that you have to pay to get the good grammar fixes so there’s always this gold notification bubble on the Grammarly extension. That bubble then makes you feel bad about your writing because you don’t understand how there could be 34 fixes that you can’t see and won’t pay for to fix. 

Many students at Fruita would argue that Grammarly is more helpful than not, to which I would agree. Sophomore Megan Formicola relays, “Personally when I am writing an essay it helps me a lot with grammar and word choice.” One thing that is extremely helpful when using the application is that they recommend better word choices when a sentence doesn’t make sense and my personal favorite is adding and subtracting commas when needed. Another plus is that for college students, the premium option is free!

A minority of writers who have tried Grammarly despise it, however. Sophomore Staci Shaw mentioned how she downloaded the extension but then soon realized that it was just annoying, the constant red lines and bubbles for fixes that don’t necessarily fit your writing. If you have ever used Jamboard or any other website with a small typing box, Grammarly will get in your way and it can become very frustrating to use. 

Since online learning, people have found more ways to make typing, editing, and communicating more user-friendly. Grammarly saw this as an opportunity to come out of the dark and advertise as much as possible using newer platforms such as Tik Tok and joining in on those weird commercials that don’t make any sense, gaining more customers. Whether you are watching a vlog or the news, Grammarly will always be there as an ad that will scare you as much as your errors scare it. People have gone as far as making a Grammarly-inspired TikTok sound which was popular and on everyone’s “for you page” during the beginning of 2021. The Grammarly hashtag now has over 195 million views on TikTok and although the trending sound has filtered out, many still use it to this day.

When writing an essay, Grammarly can be extremely helpful to make sure that you get the best grade possible, assuming that you can actually write a decent paper. The downloading process is super easy as well; all you have to do is go to the “Google Chrome web store” and search for Grammarly and download the extension. You will have to make an account if you don’t already have one but after that, you are set! Plus, they don’t send a bunch of annoying spam emails which is very pleasing. Coming from someone who uses this program almost every day, I would say that “Grammarly can help” and it does make life a lot easier when you need to turn something in right before the deadline.