Adam Engst: Why Grammarly Beats Apple’s Writing Tools for Serious Writers

Say I want to proofread this paragraph while writing in Lex, which is running in Arc. To invoke Writing Tools, I must select the paragraph, Control-click, and choose Writing Tools > Proofread from the contextual menu. Then, Writing Tools proofreads my text and presents a new version in a dialog, which may appear over the text. It doesn’t indicate what changes have been made, and the dialog cannot be moved, making it difficult or impossible to compare my original text with the update manually. The only recourse is to copy the text, paste it underneath the original, and visually compare the two.

I certainly don’t want Apple to Sherlock every app out there, but it would be nice if Writing Tools got some updates to work more like Grammarly. I used the service for a month earlier this year and was quite impressed with it. Meanwhile, Writing Tools is on all of my Apple devices, but I don’t use it for the reasons listed in the piece.