It started with a spell check

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke

When I first started writing, I wrote with a pen. Teachers had taught me the fundamentals. Reading showed me how others did it. I checked my spelling with a dictionary. Broadened my vocabulary with a thesaurus. Read grammar books to remind me of my school lessons. And used style books to keep up with the times. Strunk and White, along with William Zinsser, stood in for the tweed-jacketed academics of my youth.

Then came computers. And I retired my old Montblanc and typed my thoughts and machinations into a big box. Not much changed in the process of creation. Although it did mean I didn’t have to decipher my handwriting.

​However, stasis is anathema to technology. One day, I saw my first word underlined in red. Out of the depths of my computer, some electronic agency chided me. In its unemotional estimation, I had strayed from orthographic convention.

I naively welcomed the visitor. Although, as I am not a techie, I could not explain how it worked. But it seemed useful. Especially as correct spelling has never been this author’s forte.

Sadly, spell check soon proved to be a gateway technology. What was once merely a limited tool developed into something more embracing. I was seduced. Not easily. I showed a Victorian hesitation to a deeper relationship before proper introductions and a suitable passage of time. Yet when the conventions had been observed, I subscribed to Grammarly. The free version, mind you.

​Naively, I did not understand the reach of its ambition. It was pleased to tease me with veiled suggestions that it would render explicit if only I would pay for its favors. I long resisted its siren call. My sense of fair play combined with my inclination to penny-pinch thwarted its commercial come-ons.  

But the flesh is weak. And the day came when I capitulated and did what I had long sworn not to do. I paid for it.

​However, dear reader, let me assure you I have only gone so far and no further. I allow Grammarly to find my misspellings and missing punctuation. But the ideas are still mine. As is the plot and the vocabulary. And let me point out that even the greats had copy editors. Grammarly fulfills that function for this amateur scribe.

​But darkness beclouds the horizon. (I phrase it that way to establish my bona fides. There is no way AI would write that pretentiously, surely?)

Things changed. Now Grammarly has suggestions on style. It is not a fan of the passive voice. And it is solicitous of my public image. It asks things like, “Do you want to sound more confident?” It is like having a yenta looking over your shoulder, offering self-improvement advice you never asked for. And do not desire.

​I don’t want to sound more confident. I want to sound like me. A New York-born American who, by the caprice of his father’s career, was raised and schooled in British boarding schools. Diffidence lubricates English social interaction. Being confident is fine. Sounding confident has a whiff of a colonial striving to hide insecurity.  

But Grammarly didn't consider my opinion. It seemed to believe there was the Grammarly way and the wrong way. And I, like an incontinent puppy, needed guidance to meet the appropriate standards.

It made me wonder if Grammarly was a one-size-fits-all schoolmarm. I don't know whether the app gives different advice to different writers. But I suspect it doesn’t pay much mind to how you write as much as it wants you to live within its strictures.

Paradoxically, the more I thought on the subject, the more magical it appeared. I could understand spell check. No matter how many words there are in English, the number is finite. If you restrict the scope to words people use, the challenge shrinks by orders of magnitude.

However, even this seemingly simple assistance is not as straightforward as I initially thought. How did this inhuman authority grasp that I had misspelled ‘they’re’ as ‘their’? To know I had erred, it would have to understand the context of my sin. It was reading my stuff with some discernment.

If true, that is depressing. Should writers take the low road or easy path, and subcontract their style and content to AI, then their output, like a set of random events, would tend toward the mean. The age of literary artisans would give way to an assembly line that brooked no deviation beyond specified tolerances.

Yet beyond an analysis of the ends, there is consideration of the means. And that is where fear of uniformity gives way to awe at Grammarly’s achievement. You type. It reacts. And the question rises: How does the damn thing work?

To a liberal arts major, the STEM subjects are the province of students who do not think like me. They understand the arcana of logic and precision. They know that modern computing exists because of Boolean analysis. But they might as well have explained it to me in Greek (modern or ancient, it matters not).

I could keep up with math as long as it was arithmetic. But when the teacher substituted letters and symbols for numbers and words, it was as if my map app had crashed and I had long ago trashed my paper maps. I was a stranger in a foreign land. And I could not read the signs.

My apprehension was both general and specific. The most terrifying instruction I ever saw on a math exam was “Show your work”. I had no idea how you could present the formulation of a guess. And I was sure that was not what the examiners wanted to see anyway.

Now, years later, this former student who can spell (without assistance) derivation and integration, without having a robust understanding of the difference, stares at a screen while an inexplicable agency pops up capriciously to offer advice. How does it do it? I have no idea.

It isn’t just the individual act. It is the sheer volume of its endeavor. Google “how many people use Grammarly,” and that search engine (another mystery) tells me the stats. Forty million daily users, along with 50,000 businesses, 3,000 institutions of higher learning, and 1 million apps and websites.

It seems like science fiction to me, except I cannot deny it exists. With that in mind, Grammarly might be better described as magic. You know that the magician has a trick, often simple. But the audience has no rational explanation for what the eye plainly sees.

It isn't just Grammarly. I have read up on radio waves and aerodynamics. Yet, I'm still not really sure how an old-time radio works. Or how planes fly.