Exploring the use of grammarly in assessing English academic writing

Abstract

This study explores the extent to which Grammarly can be a reliable assessment tool for academic English writing. Ten articles published in high-status scholarly Q.1 journals and written by specialist English native speakers were used to evaluate the accuracy of Grammarly's flagged issues. The results showed that Grammarly tends to over-flag many issues resulting in many false positives; besides, it does not take into consideration optional usage in English. The study concluded that although Grammarly can identify many ambiguous instances of language use that writers would do well to review and consider for revision, it does not seem to be a reliable tool for assessing academic written English.

Keywords

• Academic writing
• Assessment
• False positives
• Grammarly