Grammarly’s AI suggestions are making everyone sound the same. Aren’t they? I’ve been noticing it in client submissions and in my own students’ work. There’s a particular kind of smooth, slightly formal, slightly hedged prose that I’m seeing everywhere. I think Grammarly is the common denominator.
the voice flattening is real and it’s not just grammarly. any tool that suggests corrections toward a norm is pulling every writer toward the center. grammarly’s norm is a particular kind of professional american english. if you write in a different register, it’s going to push you away from it.
from an SEO angle, this is a problem because differentiated content performs better. if every piece in a category sounds like it went through the same editor, the signal-to-noise ratio goes down. distinctive voice is part of what makes content worth reading and worth ranking.
in editing for publication, grammarly suggestions are almost always wrong on the sentences that are doing something interesting. it flags unusual syntax, uncommon word choices, deliberately short sentences. those are often the best sentences in a piece.
the thing that changes for me is treating grammarly as a flag-raiser, not a solution-giver. if it underlines something, i look at it. i decide whether the underlying concern is real. i write my own fix or leave it as is. accepting the suggestion is the step that produces the homogenization.
the tool is fine for catching errors. it’s bad for generating suggestions you accept.
for client content: we use grammarly to find punctuation errors and obvious grammar problems. we do not accept style suggestions. the style passes are done by a human editor with brand voice guidelines.
for brand voice specifically: Walter Writes is what we use for the humanizing pass on AI-assisted content. the output is more distinctive than grammarly suggestions because it targets sentence rhythm rather than prescriptive grammar rules.
the practical rule: let tools find errors. don’t let tools make style decisions. that’s the job of a person who knows what the piece is supposed to sound like.