B2 Upper Intermediate
Writing Tasks Using Grammarly
During this course, we will use an app called Grammarly for our writing tasks. The free app is more than adequate for our purposes in this course, so there is no reason to students to pay for the Pro version.
Grammarly is an artificial intelligence app (AI) designed to help writers improve their output by focusing on spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes. By this level of English, learners are expected to have learned to properly use most of the language’s grammar structures and wielding an extensive vocabulary. Grammarly helps to reinforce that learning by focusing students’ attention on their own mistakes, offering suggested corrections.
Additionally, Grammarly notes unique words, rare words, word length, and sentence length. While we do not focus on these ideas specifically in our writing tasks, they are all the same indicators of the writer’s ability to use a broad range of language, and may help students identify and avoid common problems such as run-on sentences.
Grammarly also detects plagiarism from published sources, online and print, so please make sure to present your own work, which is the expected standard for all academic writing.
What Grammarly Will Do
- improve writing quality by helping writers learn from mistakes
- bring attention to errors in spelling, punctuation, grammar
- suggest corrections for writers to apply to their work
- keep track of character, word, and sentence counts
- generate a beautiful report with errors cited for correction
What Grammarly Will Not Do
- help writers in any way to meet the actual requirements of any writing task
- correct very poorly-formed English, though it will certainly draw attention to it
How to Use Grammarly for Your Writing Task
It is recommended to use Grammarly instead of other applications throughout the writing process, though Grammarly offers a Microsoft Word plug-in, as well as keyboard apps to use on cellular and tablet devices.
To begin, please visit Grammarly and download the app. Once it is installed, you simply need to set the language settings to the correct dialect. At The Anglo, we teach British English, so this is the recommended setting. You may choose American English, if you prefer. However, please do not use the Canadian or Australian dialect settings for your Writing Tasks at The Anglo.
It’s important to remember that for Cambridge certifications, you may use either the British or American dialect, but once you decide which you will use, you must use it consistently.
When you start a new document, Grammarly will display a Set Goals modal, similar to what you see here. Make sure to adjust settings for formality and tone to match the task so that Grammarly understands what types of changes to recommend. The other settings are less important but may apply more strict or relaxed rules to your writing, so use them with caution.
Complete the Writing Task according to the instructions given to you by your instructor based on the approved institutional material for the course.
When you are done, review the feedback from Grammarly and make any necessary changes. Grammarly will score your work in comparison with other users of the application. This is a useful number, but this is only assessing writing for correct use of English, so it is not a reliable predictor of your grade. That said, we want to aim for our writing to be rated 90 or higher. To do this, we need to review the suggestions made by Grammarly in the right column to make the necessary changes.
To accept a change, you may simply click to accept the recommended change, and Grammarly will make the edit for you. Grammarly will notice the change and remove the edit suggestion if you choose to make the edit directly.
If the output is confusing to you, you may have confused Grammarly with a word misused previously in the document, so it remains important to review all your work, not only the errors noted by Grammarly.
Grammarly may draw your attention to grammar constructions used in your document to satisfy the requirements of the task. For example, suppose you are writing formal English in a neutral register. In that case, you may need to use passive forms extensively as part of the task. Grammarly will not understand this at all and may recommend changing those passive forms, so it is important to remember that YOU are smarter than Grammarly when it comes to understanding the requirements of the task. In short, if Grammarly is suggesting changes to the language you have included as part of the requirements of the task, ignore the suggested change. Instead, simply make sure you have used the form correctly.
When you have finished reviewing and correcting spelling, punctuation, and grammar in Grammarly, return to the task requirements to make sure you have met all the requirements of the task. Review your work again, reading it from start to finish for clarity and cohesion.
When you are satisfied that you have met the requirements of the task, and you have achieved a Grammarly rating of 90 or higher, you may now produce the document to submit for your grade. To do this, click where it says “Overall Score. See Performance” at the right upper corner of the app. Grammarly will display another modal with a link below that says “Download PDF Report”. Click to download the report and add your name to the filename so that I know whose work it is.
Submit this document using the Google Form provided by your instructor. It is essential to submit your work using the form as the questions amount to your self-evaluation, which is part of your grade. Therefore, do not submit your writing to the teacher’s email, MS Teams channel(s), chat, or any other method.
Below is a link to a sample of the PDF report produced by Grammarly, which I used to write this article. As I have either made or ignored all recommended changes, the error output with suggested corrections is missing at the end of the document where it is normally found.