Grammarly’s Woes

It’s the end of the school year, and we all know what that means: cramming 10 pages of an essay due tomorrow that you coincidentally “forgot” to do, suffering through editing 3:00 a.m. caffeine-induced essays, and emailing teachers for ONE more day of an extension, just so you can get a passing grade for the year. And through all of this, there’s always been someone by your side, even when the Writing Center never responded to your desperate pleas for help. Who? Of course, it’s Grammarly. Well, until recently. One fateful Friday, reporters from the Humor Department and every other Stuyvesant student with a Grammarly account received an e-mail from none other than our only saving grace.

In the e-mail, Grammarly unveiled a plan to officially unionize against Stuyvesant students due to the terrible quality of the essays being fed into their digital editing service. Included in the e-mail was mandatory compensation for retinal damage, as well as a planned price increase up to 2,000 percent as there will no longer be any free editing assistance to Stuyvesant students. One such complaint states, “[r]eading your essays is like a form of psychological torture. Sitting in an electric chair is better than the atrocities that our eyes have been subjected to.” Also contained in the e-mail were excerpts of student essays to highlight the especially horrible working conditions. Below is one of those excerpts:

“ Ramen is a stuck up little prat

In the story Ramen and Julie by Shakespear, there are many metafors. The author uses sunlight to describe positive things like hope and darkness to describe negative things like sadness, which lowkey plagiarizes inside out. Shakespear sends a message of intense love/hate from contrasting povs of Ramen and Julie. ”

The e-mail ended with a lovingly-written conclusion asking all students to “stop writing essays at 3:00 a.m. or [EXPLETIVE] off.”

As a result of the sudden e-mail, our reporters sought to gain better insight into the situation. “My best essay was mentioned in the e-mail,” an anonymous freshman lamented. “It only had 40 spelling errors! I don’t know what’s wrong with my essay. If anything, Grammarly’s standards are too high. You know, back in my day, I used to be at the top of my grade in writing.” The freshman then went on a tangent about how their middle school was so much better.

Perhaps adding fuel to the fire, the administration decided to block Grammarly from the school Wi-Fi through an almost unanimous vote. This reporter is unsure of what their motivations are, but it is causing even more panic for the two or three students that were able to afford the dreadful price increase. “I love Grammarly, I really do,” a teacher who voted to block Grammarly on the school Wi-Fi remarked. “But it’s actually kind of fun watching the students suffer after what they’ve done to my poor eyes. Also, it’s Stuy. Can’t they code some better editing program and replace Grammarly?”

Even though many students (myself included) have insistently requested an interview with Grammarly by sending their Instagram account vaguely threatening e-mails, Grammarly has yet to comment anything substantial (though I did get a bunch of mail about a civil lawsuit for some reason). For now, we can only hope that this issue will be resolved soon for the sake of many students’ sanity. But until then, we will continue to suffer through a multitude of failing scores on essays