Proper grammar can wreck your copy.
Using Grammarly, specifically.
Here’s why… 👇
This topic came up recently in a copywriting Facebook group.
A copywriter sent their final copy to the client.
The client ran it through Grammarly.
[Side note: If you don’t trust your copywriter to edit their own work something’s wrong… but that’s a topic for another post.]
Grammarly flagged dozens of “mistakes.”
The client was livid and went OFF on the copywriter.
The client didn’t even check to see what these alleged mistakes were. 😬
They immediately assumed Grammarly was correct and the copy was crap.
At this point dozens of copywriters in the Facebook group jumped in to defend the copywriter.
‘Cause here’s the thing…
Grammarly is like the old-fashioned schoolmarm who kept you after school for flying a paper airplane into her beehive hairdo. 🛩️
Times have changed.
High-converting copy should sound like your customer speaks.
Conversational speaking is NOT all prim and proper. (Unless you’re addressing the Queen of England. 👑 But even then .)
We naturally speak in sentence fragments.
Like this one.
… Which is one thing Grammarly “flagged.”
It flagged an entire series of bullet points because they were considered sentence “fragments”.
Plus, sentences that started with “but,” “and,” “so,” and so on were also given a thumbs down.
They also deemed nuances and slang unacceptable.
The client didn’t understand that THIS is what makes copy readable, creative and fun.
I use Grammarly for catching typos. But I often find myself turning it off when it starts honing in on the other things mentioned above.
My point is this: Grammarly – like AI – should be used as a tool, not the final word in copy.
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