The Crave

In times past, you needed to be well-educated, well-read, and — well — talented to become a good writer. It took a great deal of practice, patience, and probably criticism to hone one's writing abilities to a publishable level. Less so today. With tools like Grammarly, nearly anyone can write well without a great deal of effort. If you're not very familiar with it, Grammarly is more than a spellchecker. It looks at your tone of voice, clarity, and phrasing. It tells you how to be more engaging. It suggests synonyms and will reword entire sentences to improve them. It will adapt to your goals — whether you want to tell a story, describe something, or convince somebody. It will even consider your audience — are they business people, laymen, or academics? Are you coming across as confident or pushy? Grammarly will let you know and help you out. It's an incredible, game-changing tool. But is all of this fair? What about those who studied literature or journalism, aspiring to be great writers, but who can no longer stand out amid this new crowd of technology-augmented amateurs? And is it making us lazy? Rather than sharpening our writing abilities over time, are our skills slowly deteriorating as we rely on technology to cross our t's and dot all our i's? And does it make people sound more intelligent than they are? As we write out shoddy paragraphs and let Grammarly caress them into works of linguistic art, how much of our own voice — our own style — is left over? Tough questions. After giving them a long, hard think, I have to conclude: who even cares?