Before the comments section writes itself: this isn't a hit piece. Grammarly is a useful tool for catching typos, fixing comma splices, and flagging passive voice. If you're writing an email to your landlord, it's fine. Genuinely.
But for academic essays — the ones that determine your degree classification — Grammarly creates three problems that most students never think about. And the more you use it, the worse they get.
What Grammarly does well
Credit where it's due. Grammarly catches surface-level errors reliably: misspellings, basic punctuation mistakes, sentence fragments, and inconsistent formatting. For anyone writing in English as a second language, these corrections are valuable. For quick professional communications, it's a time-saver.
The problem isn't what Grammarly fixes. It's what Grammarly changes when it thinks it's helping.
The voice problem — everyone sounds the same
Grammarly doesn't just correct errors. It rewrites sentences. It suggests "clearer" alternatives. It replaces informal phrasing with formal phrasing. It recommends shorter sentences. And it does all of this according to a single style model that it applies to every user equally.
The result is that millions of students run their essays through the same optimisation algorithm — and the output converges toward a single, generic voice. Your voice disappears. The quirks that make your writing recognisably yours get smoothed away. The sentence you agonised over gets replaced with something technically correct but utterly lifeless.
This matters because your voice is what markers grade. At 2:1 and First-class level, the marking criteria explicitly look for "original argument," "independent thinking," and "critical voice." All of these are expressions of individuality. An essay that reads like it was written by no one in particular caps itself at 2:2 territory — not because the ideas are bad, but because there's no sense of a real person behind them.
Think of it this way: if you ran 200 essays from the same cohort through Grammarly and accepted every suggestion, the essays would become more similar to each other. That's the opposite of what markers are looking for.
The AI detection problem — Grammarly makes you look like a robot
Here's the irony that most students don't know about: Grammarly's rewrites can trigger AI detectors.
AI detection tools measure how "predictable" your text is. Grammarly's suggestions are generated by a language model — they optimise for common, predictable phrasing by design. When you accept Grammarly's rewrites, you're replacing your idiosyncratic human phrasing with statistically optimal machine phrasing. To a detector, that looks like AI-generated text.
We've seen this in our own testing. Essays that were entirely human-written but heavily edited by Grammarly consistently score higher on AI probability than the unedited versions. The student didn't cheat — they just used a tool that made their writing look less human.
This is particularly dangerous at universities that run automated detection on every submission. If Turnitin flags your Grammarly-polished essay as "possibly AI-generated," you could face an academic misconduct investigation for an essay you wrote entirely yourself. You'd be right that it's unfair. You'd also be the one sitting in the hearing.
The dependency problem — you stop learning to write
This is the one nobody talks about, and it's the most damaging long-term.
When you accept Grammarly's corrections automatically — click, click, click down the sidebar — you're not learning why the error was wrong. You're outsourcing a skill to a tool. After three years of this, you graduate with the same writing ability you arrived with, plus a dependency on software that you won't have in every professional context.
Worse, Grammarly often "corrects" things that aren't wrong. It flags stylistic choices as errors. It marks intentional sentence fragments — a legitimate rhetorical device — as mistakes. It recommends passive-to-active voice changes that alter your meaning. Students who accept every suggestion without thinking end up with technically "correct" text that doesn't say what they intended.
The best writers break rules on purpose. Grammarly doesn't know the difference between a mistake and a choice.
What to do instead
Use Grammarly for what it's good at. Turn off the style suggestions and the "clarity" rewrites. Keep the spell-checker and the punctuation corrections. These are genuinely useful. The rest is actively harmful for academic writing.
Learn the rules yourself. If Grammarly keeps flagging the same errors — comma splices, apostrophe misuse, run-on sentences — learn the rule once. A 5-minute grammar guide will serve you for life. Grammarly will serve you until your subscription expires.
Get feedback that helps you improve. The difference between a grammar tool and a writing tool is this: a grammar tool fixes your text. A writing tool helps you understand why something isn't working. SafeGrade's Essay Coach doesn't rewrite your sentences — it explains what's weak in your argument, where your analysis drops off, and what your marker is looking for that you haven't provided. It teaches you to write better, not to write like a machine.
Read your essay aloud. This is the oldest writing advice in existence, and it's still the best diagnostic tool available. If a sentence sounds unnatural when you say it out loud, it'll sound unnatural to your marker. No software required.
Grammarly isn't a bad product. It's a bad fit for academic writing. The sooner students understand that distinction, the sooner they start writing essays that sound like a real person with real ideas — which is, ultimately, what every marker is looking for.
you better — not your software.