by Tyler Wenzel
You want to keep writing but the red squiggle keeps stealing your attention. There are three of them visible in my notes on screen as I write this introduction. They keep distracting me. The built-in spellchecker insists that words like nGrams are incorrect and need fixed! Ironically the spellchecker is Google’s and nGrams is a Google tool for analyzing the corpus of English literature. It appears they don’t communicate across departments in Palo Alto. It would be easy enough to quickly disable the tool or add the word to the dictionary but then I’d interrupt my workflow. Alas, now I have a different colored squiggle because I just split an infinitive in the last sentence. Does it need changed? (No, English isn’t Latin. Split infinitives are fine.)
A few readers might remember a time before spelling and grammar-checking tools became ubiquitous. From their origins as stand-alone programs in the 1980s to inclusion in Microsoft Word in 1991 they’ve grown into third-party tools using machine learning like Grammarly and Quill and the autocorrect features on our phones. It’s never been easier to avoid orthographical errors. Their use is nearly universal, although the frequent use of the Comment in our College Edition Library reminding students to use them belies how often they aren’t used.
For most learners who grew up with these tools, it’s a common assumption that they are near infallible and their suggestions should be considered gospel. Without a deep comprehension of English grammar, ignoring its suggestions seems foolhardy. It knows better than I do after all. But who is ‘the man behind the curtain’ of these tools? And more importantly are educators properly teaching students their limitations and when to ignore them?
The Case for Spelling and Grammar Checkers
For simplicity’s sake we will refer to the collection of tools used to check spelling, grammar, and more as SGCs. These might be the spellcheck built into a web browser or Microsoft Word or a standalone app like Grammarly. Increasingly, this also includes tools like LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) being asked to proofread writing.
They are fantastic tools. Few experiences are more humbling for a writer than realizing they’ve accidentally been turned off only to watch the paper light up like a Christmas tree. We’ve grown reliant on them to catch common errors of spelling or misuse of words like you’re and your and to remind us to use more active voice. These tools particularly benefit writers with disorders like dyslexia. O’Rourke et al. (2020) demonstrated how Grammarly has leveled the playing field for dyslexic students. Their papers contained significantly more misspellings than non-dyslexic students when Grammarly was disabled but once enabled the results were uniform.
Beyond simple spelling mistakes, SGCs help to improve the clarity of writing. Wibowo (2022) found that tools like Grammarly improved the clarity of students writing as well as their confidence in their writing skills. AI tools like ChatGPT have been thrown into the mix and a systematic review by Raad et al. (2023) summarized the results of a study by Chen et al. (2022) noting a “significant improvement in writing quality, with students showing a better understanding of grammar rules and reduced errors in their writing.”
What’s the Catch?
SGC and LLM tools are quite competent at spellchecking and improving writing clarity. That’s common knowledge in 2024. So why are we writing about them? To quote Exploring the Profound Impact of Artificial Intelligence Applications (Quillbot, Grammarly and ChatGPT) on English Academic Writing: A Systematic Review (bold ours)
Students and writers may become overly dependent on [these tools], neglecting essential writing skills and critical thinking processes. Relying too heavily on AI for writing tasks can hinder creativity and originality, as users may be inclined to follow the tool’s suggestions mindlessly without critically evaluating their writing choices.
Now we arrive at the crux of the issue. SGCs can improve writing but they can’t create high quality writing. That has to come from the writer. Writers in turn need help in developing the necessary skills. As Dr. Anne Curzan, Dean of the College of Literature, Science, and Arts at Michigan University mentioned in her book Fixing English:
Given that their school-based language instruction is largely prescriptive and that few, if any, precollege students have been let in on the secret that the prescriptions of Standard English are neither natural, nor logical, nor productive of language that is ‘better’ (in any meaningful sense of the word) than nonstandard Englishes, most simply accept the authority of this smart machine to police their grammar, just as they have heretofore accepted the authority of their smart teachers.
These tools suffer from a black box phenomenon. The original versions of Microsoft Word’s Spellchecker and standalone pieces of software touted what style guide or dictionary it based its decision on. Today’s software doesn’t reveal these details. They simply prescribe certain usages without explaining on what basis or authority they do so.
While they are certainly useful at identifying errors, an instructors touch is still extremely important. As Bailey & Lee (2020) put it:
Grammarly was more appropriate for local surface-level errors (e.g. articles, preposition, and verb-noun agreement) while instructors are needed for issues related to awkward wording and cohesion.
While less important with most formal academic writing, this is especially true of prose. Would you change anything about this paragraph from On the Road by Jack Kerouac?
Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road.
Grammarly suggests three changes to this paragraph alone. Mr. Kerouac developed his unique style and knew when to bend the rules and why he chose to do so. A student in their formative years needs guidance to understand when to ignore SGC tools. The end goal of writing is clear (and at times creative) communication of ideas. Prescriptions in grammar serve as general guidelines towards that end but are not an end in themselves. SGCs should highlight potential changes but shouldn’t be the one making the decision.
Real World Impacts
These tools are shaping the way English is written. While the adjustments made by tools like Grammarly tend to be minor, some suggestions are dramatically changing the frequency of use of some words. Jeremy Nguyen, at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia was looking to see what percentage of papers had AI tools involved in writing. He noticed a 10 – 100 fold uptick in papers on PubMed involving the word “delve” since the launch of ChatGPT.
This piece from The Guardian explained that OpenAI outsourced a lot of the necessary human feedback that was used as part of the training process of its models to native English speakers in Nigeria where the word delve (and other words it loves like “explore”, “testament”, and “leverage”) is much more commonly used than in other English speaking parts of the world. (As an aside: some SGCs get upset if your sentence exceeds 60 words, assuming it must be a run on sentence. That sentence comes in at 62 words and is perfectly fine, yet many SGCs would lead you to believe otherwise.)
Does this mean AI is writing all these papers? Not necessarily. A further analysis of the PubMed data was done by Kobak et al. (2024, preprint). They found that the countries with the highest usage of suspected writing generated by LLMs were China, Indonesia, South Korea, and Taiwan. The lowest were the US, UK, and New Zealand. Is this indicative of lower levels of academic integrity in those high LLM use countries? Actually, the suspected use of LLMs as a writing assistant for papers written in English was correlated with whether English is the native language of the country. The paper stated:
In non-English speaking countries, LLMs might indeed help non-natives with editing English texts, which could justify their extensive use.
Those of us in the English speaking world might default to viewing tools like Grammarly and Word’s Spellchecker as being quite distinct from LLMs like ChatGPT. Considering 3 out of 4 English speakers use English as a second (or third or fourth) language, the distinctions are a lot blurrier than we might first assume. Many writers of academic papers are using tools like ChatGPT in an effort to make their writing sound more like a native speaker. It works, they just inadvertently and unknowingly write like they are from Nigeria.
The Role of the Instructor
There is nothing wrong with English from Nigeria. It’s home to one of the world’s largest groups of English speakers. Writing with a distinctly Nigerian flavor (or any dialect) should be a conscience style choice. Imagine writing a research paper in the Cockney slang of Dickens or the folksy idiomatic language of the American Deep South. Much as we language lovers dream of everyone having a thorough grasp of the intricacies of English grammar and linguistics, that isn’t a realistic proposition. Especially when we remember that a large portion of academic writing is being composed by individuals with a first language other than English. Regardless if the student is writing a formal Academic paper, some literary prose, or learning to write as a knowledge worker in the modern global economy educators have a role in teaching students how to use SGCs.
The problem with these tools is that they are heavily prescriptive without ever explaining to learners why they are allegedly incorrect. Returning to Dr. Curzan’s book Fixing English, she stated:
The program can usefully alert writers, both experienced and less experienced, to a potentially infelicitous construction that merits a second look. That said, composition instructors rightly worry that the grammar checker can make students worry about the prettiness of the written product even while they are in the drafting stages and should be focused on process, not product.
Students need less guidance on memorizing rules and parts of speech and more help with communicating clearly which is the end goal of grammar. Error checking is often conflated with having “good grammar”. Or as Dr. Curzan put it:
The modern field of composition studies has been plagued by conflicting understandings of “grammar teaching” and by the tradition of error hunting. The two are, unfortunately, often seen as almost synonymous in education: to teach grammar is to help students identify and eliminate “errors” in their sentences, rather than to think about how language is structured and what grammatical choices are appropriate in which contexts.
Automated tools can quickly identify common mistakes, but even today they continue to struggle with non-standard, acceptable alternatives. And as A Dictionary of Modern English Usage offers:
Follow no arbitrary rule, but remember that there are often two or more possible arrangements between which a choice should be consciously made.
Teach the Tools
How can educators integrate teaching how to use these tools into their curriculum? One little known aspect of SGC tools is their customizability. For example in Microsoft Word, via the Settings you can control in great detail what types of structures it corrects. Some educators have found success at helping students better grasp grammar rules by prompting students to specifically write sentences that will be flagged by the SGC tool. This way they are forced to consciously consider these incorrect structures rather than simply try to remember a rule they are supposed to adhere to.
Building on Dr. Curzan’s concern that “grammar checker can make students worry about the prettiness of the written product even while they are in the drafting stages and should be focused on process” teaching students to draft with the SGC turned off is a helpful strategy. Many of us are guilty of simply accepting a quick change from Grammarly as we draft without even thinking about it, just to get rid of the annoyingly vibrant squiggles. Instead, have students write their draft and focus on core writing fundamentals like having a strong thesis statement, well supported argument, and an effective introduction and conclusion. Only after finishing the draft should the tools be turned on and then methodically analyzed.
Pasting the whole article into more advanced tools like LLMs are more complex and more dependent on the prompt given to the LLM than which tool is being used. Specifically asking it to suggest adjustments to achieve a certain tone, adherence to a specific style guide, or use language from a certain region or dialect will result in a noticeably better output.
Conclusion
In an era where writing assistance tools range from basic spell checkers to advanced AI systems, educators face both opportunities and challenges. While these tools can significantly improve the technical aspects of writing, particularly for non-native English speakers and those with learning difficulties, they also risk creating an over-reliance that could stifle creativity and critical thinking. The key lies in teaching students not just how to use tools like spell checkers, Grammarly, and AI writing assistants, but when and why to use them – and importantly, when to ignore their suggestions. By fostering an understanding of grammar as a means to clear communication rather than a set of inflexible rules, we can help students become more confident and effective writers.
Ultimately, the goal should be to empower students to make conscious choices about their writing, using these various tools as aids rather than authorities. This involves teaching students to draft without distractions from squiggles, to critically evaluate suggestions from grammar checkers, and to understand the limitations of AI-generated content. As we navigate this new landscape, it’s crucial that we continue to evolve our teaching methods to ensure that technology enhances, rather than replaces, the fundamental skills of effective writing. By doing so, we can prepare students not just to write correctly, but to write thoughtfully and purposefully in an increasingly digital world.
References
Techscape: AI Gadgets and the Humane AI Pin. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/apr/16/techscape-ai-gadgest-humane-ai-pin-chatgpt
At Least 10% of Research May Already Be Co-Authored by AI. The Economist. Available at: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/06/26/at-least-10-of-research-may-already-be-co-authored-by-ai
Delving into ChatGPT Usage in Academic Writing Through Excess Vocabulary (Kobak, D. González-Márquez, R., Horvát, E.-Á., Lause, J.)
Use of Spellcheck in Text Production by College Students with Dyslexia (O’Rourke, L., Connelly, V., Barnett, A., & Afonso, O.)
An Exploratory Study of Grammarly in the Language Learning Context: An Analysis of Test-Based, Textbook-Based and Facebook Corpora (Bailey, D., & Lee, A. R.)
Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History (Curzan, A.)
Exploring the Profound Impact of Artificial Intelligence Applications (Quillbot, Grammarly and ChatGPT) on English Academic Writing: A Systematic Review (Bareq Raad Raheem, Farheen Anjum, & Zanyar Nathir Ghafar)
Note: other studies cited in the subheading “What’s the Catch” come from their summaries presented in this meta analysis.