My Frustrations With Grammarly and My Work: Complaints from a Disgruntled Writer
In case you didn’t know, I’m a freelance writer. I don’t get paid much for writing articles, but hey… it’s better than nothing.
Sometimes, I have a good time writing articles about fun and interesting topics. Other times, I get really frustrated. And I don’t think I’ve been more frustrated at my job than this week.
When I finish an article, I’m obliged to use Grammarly, Hemingway, a plagiarism checker, and an SEO checker. I’ve already mentioned my grievances with Hemingway before, but that’s not what I’m going to complain about in this article.
No, in case you haven’t read the title, I’m going to complain about Grammarly, or more accurately, my writing job’s Grammarly account.
Now, when I use Grammarly, I use my writing job’s Grammarly account to help edit my articles. They have a premium account there, which is something I will probably never afford. Normally, I would use the account, edit my article, and proceed to Hemingway. Occasionally, my writing job would change the password, and that would be the biggest gripe I would have about Grammarly.
That is not what happened this week.
When I finished an article one day, I went onto Grammarly, and it told me to login. Again, my writing job would occasionally change the Grammarly password. The thing is… I didn’t remember them announcing the new password. So, I entered what I thought was the current password was, but Grammarly said the username and/or password was incorrect.
“What was going on?” I wondered to myself. I contacted one of the HR people stating that I was having an issue logging into Grammarly. Now, about my writing job: there are many people all around the world working there, so I wasn’t expecting an immediate response. So, I went about my day with Hemingway and the rest of the writing tools I use for editing articles.
Later on, I got a response from the HR person I had contacted earlier, saying:
“Please use the free version. We are having experiencing problems with our Grammarly account. Thank you for your patience.”
I sighed and returned to Grammarly, logging under my account, which is the free version. And if you know anything about free versions vs. premium versions of anything, it’s that the free versions are never as good as premium versions.
And that’s how things were for the next few articles. Then, my writing job finally changed an email and their password for Grammarly. Naturally, I took advantage of it for one article. Yes, just one article.
For my next article, I tried logging into the new Grammarly account, but it said the same thing as it did for the previous Grammarly account. So, I contacted another HR person stating the same issue. Sure enough, that HR person said the same thing.
“Please use the free version. We are experiencing problems with our Grammarly account. Thank you for your patience.”
At that point, I was nearly fed up. Couldn’t these people get their things straight with their Grammarly account for ONE DAY? One day — that’s all I’m asking! What’s even going on there?! Were they getting hacked, or did Grammarly delete their accounts?
Finally, on the last article I had to do, one of the HR people made an account on ProWritingAid and told us writers to use that instead. It was my first time using ProWritingAid, and, as someone who’s so used to editing her articles on Grammarly, I have to say that I kind of missed Grammarly (believe it or not).
Maybe I’ll get used to ProWritingAid if I have to use it enough times, but man does this situation frustrate me. I wish the people at my writing job would get their things straight with Grammarly. I just feel so… disgruntled and depleted without it. I don’t know. I just want things to get better and back to the way they were, I guess.
