Grammarly Grammar and Spelling Checker issues

After spending months using Grammarly's browser extension -- the Firefox add-on most often -- I have come to like and dislike the extension. You can check out my Grammarly Premium review for a rundown on features.

In this article, I will concentrate on issues that I experienced while using Grammarly.

I developed workarounds for some of them and don't consider them critical enough to stop using Grammarly, for now. I'm not sure whether I will extend my subscription once it runs out, however.

Grammarly takes over the browser's spell checker

This may not sound like such a bad thing at first glance; you do get a -- hopefully -- more capable spell checker and grammar checker in return.

A couple of things are problematic:

• In Firefox at least, Grammarly does not underline issues so that I cannot correct them right away. I have to open the Grammarly interface to do so.
• All words that I added to the browser's dictionary are not imported by Grammarly. This means that I have to "teach" Grammarly to ignore words that I taught the browser to ignore already.

Embeds are lost

Grammarly removes embeds in WordPress when I embed before I run the spell and grammar checking tool.

I only embed YouTube videos, but whenever I do, I need to make sure that I embed it after I check the article for spelling issues.

I don't know how wide-spread the issue is, and whether it affects other embeds on WordPress or other platforms, or if it is limited to YouTube embeds when using WordPress.

Linking issues

Adding links to articles that I write is important. This works the same way as before but with one notable exception.

Words or phrases that are marked by Grammarly cannot be added to links until you either ignore the word or phrase, or correct it.

This leads to situations where a link is divided into two or even more parts because of words that Grammarly flagged.

Erratic jumping around

When I use Grammarly's interface to fix errors, I sometimes notice that the cursor jumps around erratically. This interferes with my typing at times and leads to more issues as I need to correct the new issue caused by the jumping around.

Also, when you write a word or phrase that Grammarly does not know (and thus thinks is incorrect), you may notice that the cursor jumps back a position to the end of that word after you hit space.

This leads to situations where you add the next word right after the last without having a space between the two words.

Dictionary lacks Tech terms, acronyms and words

Grammarly's spell checker is quite good but it lacks a lot of tech words, phrases and acronyms.  While I can understand that its directory does not know complex or specialized terms, it is surprising that its dictionary does not include common words or phrases.

Now You: Do you use a spell checker or grammar checker like Grammarly?