It’s not often that Apple swallows their pride to make big changes to iOS, but every once in a blue moon it does happen. One relatively recent example of this is allowing the use of third-party keyboards. When it was announced, it was the change I didn’t know I needed. Although I tolerated the iOS keyboard, it wasn’t my favorite and I was definitely missing some keyboard features that are easy to come by on Android devices. Although third-party keyboards can’t provide every feature I miss (namely haptic feedback) it is nice to be able to choose alternatives.
Recently, I saw that Grammarly released a new mobile keyboard on Android and iOS. I use Grammarly sometimes (not as often as I should) and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to give it a shot on my smartphone. Really, it works exactly as it would anywhere else. The keyboard analyzes your text and makes suggestions and corrections based on what you’ve written. No harm, no foul.
The only problem is that I realized on my smartphone, I tend to communicate a lot less formally than I do on the computer, mostly because I primarily text and use social media. On the computer, I’m usually doing work, writing e-mails, or doing schoolwork.
Now, I will say that Grammarly didn’t try to correct all of my mistakes. The most blatant ones like “omggggggg” and “WAT” were left alone, maybe because they were so butchered from a real word in the English language that the program didn’t recognize what I was trying to say at all. What it did do was correct my incorrect use of commas, add capitals and punctuation, and autocorrected some words that I did not intentionally misspell (“acetaminophen” was one of them). And that’s great for when you want to sound professional and/or impress somebody by not sounding like a doofus, but most of the people I text already know that I’m a doofus and I try hard to live up to expectations by typing like one.
The only thing I didn’t like about the keyboard was that it doesn’t feature swipe gestures, which is an important part of texting for me as it allows me to feasibly use my phone one-handed for almost everything. I guess that makes sense, as I seem to have more blunders swiping my words than when I type them out one letter at a time (because so many words have similar swipe paths), but that’s a compromise I’m willing to live with because it’s just as easy to swipe the word away and try again.
In the end, because I care more about swiping than I do about being grammatically correct when I use my smartphone, I probably won’t be using the Grammarly keyboard unless it does happen to add swiping in a future update. But even if it doesn’t, it’s still a pretty good keyboard for people who want to keep it professional, or maybe just brush up on their grammar skills. After all, practice makes perfect!
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