Grammarly for Academic Writing – What It Can and Actually Can’t Do
I’d push back on how Grammarly gets discussed in teacher circles. People either think it’s a great academic writing tool or they think it’s cheating-adjacent. The reality is more specific than either.
What Grammarly is actually good at: surface-level grammar, spelling, basic clarity edits. For students with consistent surface-level errors, it’s genuinely useful and helps them see patterns in their mistakes.
What Grammarly is NOT good at: argument structure, evidence quality, logical coherence, discipline-specific writing conventions. It makes academic essays sound smoother without making them better. A poorly argued essay with perfect grammar is still a poorly argued essay.
For detection: Grammarly’s AI detection feature is weak. Colleagues who use it for detection are mistaking a writing quality tool for an integrity tool. The sample size in their research is too small.
My honest recommendation: Grammarly as a grammar learning tool for students who need it, with the explicit understanding that it doesn’t improve argument quality and shouldn’t be used for AI detection.
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the Grammarly edge cases you're describing are well-documented but rarely discussed in academic settings. the passive voice suggestions especially - it pushes students away from passive voice regardless of disciplinary convention, which is wrong for science writing where passive is standard. uncritical acceptance of Grammarly suggestions produces writing that sounds like a business email regardless of genre.
Grammarly is fine for basics but don't rely on it for anything beyond surface errors. the academic writing conventions piece is what matters at higher grade levels and Grammarly actively misses those. used it in a class last year and several students produced smooth-sounding essays with fundamentally incoherent arguments. the tool helped them paper over the problem instead of fix it.
smoother writing that's still poorly argued is actually harder to mark. now you have to read carefully to find the weak argument instead of it being obvious from the grammar.