#although I have to wonder why such an accomplished writer would have grammar software at all
(Sorry for the formatting on this; I'm on mobile.)
Why use grammar software? Because I'm a human who makes errors, and it can be helpful to have tools that I, as a writer and editor, can fall back on to catch very basic things that sometimes get missed.
I don't rely on it because sometimes (quite often, as of late) it can be wrong, but it can be helpful when checking your work. I use them to scan quickly for excess commas or the occasional homonym before I fire my files off to another human to give them the final pass. Or I used to.
I've talked a lot about how the integration of AI is making a lot of grammar software dumber. This is because they are not being trained exclusively on grammar rules anymore but on user-suggested data.
It's why, for a long time, when you tried to type "quirked" into Google Docs, GD would suggest "querched" instead because that is how a lot of people misspell the word "quirked."
It is a flawed, lousy system that is getting exponentially worse. Especially now, so many of them have "Let AI rewrite your sentence for clarity and engagement" options.
It's not really an issue for me because I have the knowledge and the support to turn things like this into an annoying issue that makes for an amusing post on social media.
But if I were a less experienced author and didn't have an editor who knew my writing style well enough to know something was wrong, that manuscript could have gone to print as is, and that's also why I suspect a lot of books right now read like carbon copy clones.
People aren't being taught these skills, but they are being trained to appease the software, which is, in turn, trying to please an algorithm.
Pro-Writing-Aid has become very bad for this, offering a "grade" at the top of your file. And yeah, it looks just like getting your term paper back. The last time I accidentally turned on the grading system, it gave me 50% out of 100 for grammar and style, based on what the algorithm thinks Romance should read like.
When I asked it to find grammar and style errors, it couldn't find any. It just didn't like that I was different from what it was being trained on. (Girl help, I was assigned Not Like Other Girls by the Algorithm and got a bad grade in vampire smut.)
And again, were I not me, were I a younger or inexperienced author, I might take that to heart and start altering my style to get a Good Grade based on what the machine wants.
And that's how I know we're in the Bad Place because there are people doing that. They think the machine is smart because someone tacked the word "intelligence" onto it, and they are writing to appease the software instead of using it like a tool that you can and should ignore.
For me, it was worth it to pay for those tools for a long time. Now it's not, and I'll be saving my money for other things.
