The Need for Good/Non-AI Grammar Checking

My job title is plagiarism expert. However, I spend the vast majority of my day writing.

I write posts for this site; I write emails; I write reports for my clients, and much more. It’s common for me to write over 5,000 words in a given day.

However, I am also an operation of one, and I am a terrible editor of my own work. As such, I’ve relied on automated editing tools, most notably grammar and spell checkers, to help me minimize typos and other errors.

Though I’ve been repeatedly lampooned for the mistake that made it through, I can ensure everyone that the earlier drafts were, almost certainly, much worse.

However, I’ve become increasingly worried about the writing support space. Though AI has permeated every aspect of our lives, none has become as thoroughly engulfed as grammar and spell checking.

Unfortunately, this is a significant problem. While some, I’m certain, are happy about these new features, many are not. This has pushed grammar and spell checking well beyond being a virtual editor or proofreader and into the writer’s seat.

This is a big concern for many people. However, the most impacted are likely students who both need accurate writing but also fear being accused of AI cheating. We require an effective alternative.

However, after months of searching, I haven’t found one that I’m happy with, and I have a growing sense of dread that I never will.

Understanding the Problem with AI Checkers

The biggest issue with AI in grammar checking is AI itself. Many people, myself included, don’t want to use AI for ethical, personal or practical reasons. AI spelling/grammar checkers make that difficult to do.

Sure, it’s usually easy to avoid the most AI-heavy features, such as text generation. But other features, such as sentence and paragraph rewriting blur the lines in uncomfortable ways and are often so baked in to the product they can’t be disabled.

However, even if one is comfortable with AI, there are still major problems.

1. Cost: Grammar checking is expensive. While some companies like Grammarly, LanguageTool and Hemingway offer free versions, they are extremely limited. A Grammarly Pro account is $144 per year, LanguageTool costs $70 per year for premium and Hemingway costs at least $100. In an era of subscription fatigue and tightening budgets, these are hefty costs.
2. Privacy: All of these services require you to send what you type to their servers for analysis. Though this has always created a privacy concern, AI adds another layer to it. AI has an insatiable appetite for new content and there’s nothing more fresh than something just written.
3. Speed: The more complicated the software, the more bottlenecks there are. As someone who types exceptionally fast (one of my few true bragging points), this lag can be incredibly frustrating. Grammarly has acknowledged this and made some improvements, but I still often find that these tools drastically slow, not expedite, the writing process.
4. Changing Writing Styles: These AI tools have to justify their costs and implementation. One of the ways they do that is detecting more issues. However, the issues regularly blur the line between fixing mistakes and changing one’s individual style. While one is always free to reject a recommendation, that is another slowdown. Even worse, the AI will frequently recommend the same change over and over again, even after it has been rejected.

For some, these trade-offs may be worthwhile. However, I’ve seen a very steady decline in the quality, usability and value of writing assistance tools. While it would be easy to blame one company or another, the issue is industry-wide.

So, I decided to seek out alternatives. What I found left me wanting.

Trying to Find a Path Forward

Over the past month, I began searching for a better solution to this problem. To that end, I had two main requirements.

1. Offline: I needed the tool to work offline and eliminate any privacy concerns by never letting the writing leave my computer.
2. Available Where I Write: The vast majority of the work I do is in Chrome-based web browser but also use Safari at times. As such, it needed to be where I am working.

The first system I tried was LanguageTool. Though LanguageTool’s main product has leaned heavily into AI, it offers a way to create a local instance that gives you basic functionality fully offline.

Since my main writing computer is a Mac, the process of setting it up was fairly simple and, overall, it’s worked well. To be clear, it’s a relatively basic tool. Still, it’s offline, available via a browser extension and relatively fast. It’s also completely free.

The biggest drawback I see is that it does require a degree of technical savvy and a relatively beefy system to set up. Also, I found that I had to enable “Picky Mode” as regular mode was letting a lot of mistakes slip through.

The other solution I have tried extensively is Harper. Harper is a relatively straightforward Chrome extension. You install it, and it checks grammar and spelling right out of the box.

The biggest advantage of Harper is speed. It is lightening quick. It also does a decent job of spotting most mistakes and providing good context for them.

However, I had abandon Harper because it struggled with formatted text. By default, it’s only enabled on a small list of sites and for good reason. I found that it would erase formatting, such as removing links or headers, when making simple corrections. There’s also no Safari extension. This made it impractical for me to use daily.

I also tried several others including Antidote and Hemingway. However, I had to dismiss those due to various technical issues.

Bottom Line

Through this entire experiment I felt like a salmon swimming up stream. If you open the Mac App Store, you’ll find dozens of “grammar checkers” all touting the heavy use of AI.

For better or worse, this is clearly the direction the industry is going. But it’s left a vacuum for those who either don’t want or can’t use those features. Not everyone has stable internet access, money to spare, powerful computers or a desire to use AI.

There’s a real need for effective spelling and grammar checking that goes beyond that is available by default in a web browser or (non-AI) word processor, but doesn’t lean into the AI craze.

Fortunately for me, I’m one of the lucky ones. I don’t have teachers or editors strictly forbidding me from using AI. If I wanted to incorporate AI into my writing, I realistically could without much consequence. I simply don’t because, to be frank, I don’t want to.

Still, I know that I cannot be alone in this position. So I’m asking the world. What did I overlook? Are there alternatives that I missed? Is there a more simple solution I’m not seeing?

It has been a wildly frustrating month.