Grammarly Review

I can tell when a cover letter has been Grammarly-polished. Not because the grammar is perfect, plenty of good writers have clean grammar, but because the sentences have that specific evenness to them. Every clause the right length. Every transition tidy. No rough edges, and no personality either.

That is the trade-off with Grammarly, and it is the honest conversation nobody is having. In 12 years of placing candidates, I have seen the tool save more applications than it has killed. It catches the typo in “manger” that would have got your CV deleted at 4pm on a Friday. But I have also read cover letters where the writer clearly hit “Accept all” on the Premium rewrites, and what landed on my desk was a beige, grammatically immaculate non-person.

So this review is about using Grammarly without losing the thing that actually gets you hired: a voice that sounds like a human being a recruiter would want to meet.

What Grammarly actually is (for job seekers)

Grammarly is a writing assistant that sits on top of whatever you are writing in (browser, Word, Gmail, LinkedIn, your own desktop editor) and flags issues in real time. The free tier handles grammar, spelling, punctuation and very basic clarity. The Premium tier, around $12 a month on annual billing, layers in tone detection, full sentence rewrites, style consistency and plagiarism checks.

For job seekers, only three of those features actually matter:

1. Grammar and spelling (free). This is the bare minimum. If your CV has “mangement” on it, you are done before you have started.
2. Tone detector (free, limited / Premium). Useful for cover letters. It tells you if your opening reads as confident, tentative or stiff.
3. Rewrites (Premium). Dangerous. This is where voice goes to die.

I do not recommend Grammarly Business for individuals. That tier is priced for teams and the extra features are not worth it for someone writing one cover letter a fortnight.

Where Grammarly earns its place in the job-search stack

The free tier is worth installing, full stop. Here is why.

Typos are binary. A CV with one typo does not get “mostly read”, it gets deleted. I have watched hiring managers do it in front of me. Grammarly free catches 95% of these. The ROI on installing a free browser extension to avoid that is infinite.

Mixed tenses in CV bullets. This is the single most common mistake I see on graduate and career-changer CVs. “Managed the project, organise weekly stand-ups, delivered the pilot.” Grammarly flags tense inconsistency faster than any human proofreader. One pass through your CV with the extension on will usually catch two or three.

Tone detector on cover letters. Paste your draft into the Grammarly editor and it will tell you if your opening reads as “tentative” or “formal” or “friendly”. That is genuinely useful feedback. Most cover letters I receive are too stiff, and the tone detector is the closest thing to an automated second opinion. I would rather a candidate see “your tone is formal and distant” before I do.

LinkedIn About sections. People write these at 11pm and never re-read them. Having Grammarly running inside the LinkedIn editor means you do not ship an About section that starts with “Experinced marketing professional”.

Where Grammarly falls down

Now the honest part.

The rewrites are voice poison. When Grammarly Premium suggests a full rewrite of your sentence, it almost always replaces a specific, personal phrase with a generic, corporate one. “I ran the onboarding programme for 40 new hires last year” becomes “I successfully managed the onboarding programme for 40 new hires last year.” That word “successfully” is the kiss of death. Hiring managers mentally delete it every time.

It does not flag the buzzwords that recruiters actually hate. Grammarly will not tell you that “results-driven”, “spearheaded”, “leveraged” and “passionate” are the four horsemen of the CV bin. These are not grammar errors, they are judgement errors, and Grammarly is blind to them. For that, you need a human or an AI that has actually read thousands of CVs. (I wrote a longer piece on resume buzzwords recruiters hate if you want the full list.)

American English by default. If you do not go into settings and change the language to British English, Grammarly will try to “correct” specialise to specialize, organisation to organization, and CV to resume. For a UK application, this is actively harmful. Do the 30-second settings fix the moment you install it.

Over-correction of confident short sentences. Good cover letters often use short, punchy sentences. “I have done this before. I can do it here.” Grammarly frequently flags these as “incomplete” or suggests combining them. Ignore it. Short sentences land harder than tidy compound ones.

Premium is priced like software, used like a proofreader. At roughly $144 a year, Premium costs more than a professional human CV review would on a one-off basis. If you are writing one CV and five cover letters over a job search, the economics do not really work. Free tier plus a paid human review of your final CV is often the better stack.

The output test

Here is what actually happens when you run real job-search text through Grammarly Premium’s rewrite suggestions. These are the kinds of edits I see daily in candidates who have clearly hit “Accept all”.

Cover letter opening (before):

“I saw the role advertised on Tuesday and stopped scrolling, because I have spent three years doing exactly this kind of work at a smaller scale and I want to do it properly.”

Grammarly Premium rewrite:

“I was intrigued by the advertised role, as I have accumulated three years of relevant experience in a similar capacity and am eager to expand my skill set.”

The first one is a human talking. The second one is a generic applicant. The first one gets a phone call.

CV bullet (before):

“Cut onboarding time from 6 weeks to 9 days by rewriting the induction checklist.”

Grammarly Premium rewrite:

“Successfully reduced the onboarding timeline from 6 weeks to 9 days through the optimisation of the induction checklist.”

The first one is specific and active. The second one uses “successfully” (meaningless), “optimisation” (vague) and “through the” (filler). Hiring managers skim. The first bullet survives the skim, the second gets glossed over.

LinkedIn About section (before):

“I place people into fintech engineering roles. I have done it for 12 years and I am good at it. If your last recruiter disappeared mid-process, we should talk.”

Grammarly Premium rewrite:

“As an experienced recruitment professional, I specialise in placing candidates into fintech engineering roles. With over 12 years of industry experience, I am committed to delivering a high-quality service.”

One of these sounds like a person. The other sounds like every third profile on LinkedIn.

The lesson: use Grammarly free for errors. Use Grammarly Premium’s tone detector. Do not accept its rewrites without reading them out loud first.

Pricing

• Free: grammar, spelling, punctuation, basic clarity. Genuinely useful.
• Premium: around $12/month on annual billing (roughly $30 on monthly). Adds tone detection detail, rewrites, style consistency, plagiarism.
• Business: team plan, not relevant for individual job seekers.

My honest take: the free tier covers most job seekers. Premium is worth one month, for one job search, if you are writing a lot of cover letters and want the tone detector. Then cancel it.

Grammarly vs alternatives

Grammarly vs ChatGPT for writing. ChatGPT can draft, Grammarly can only edit. For writing a cover letter from scratch, ChatGPT wins. For catching typos in a cover letter you have already written, Grammarly wins. Use both, not one. My guide to ChatGPT cover letter prompts covers the drafting side.

Grammarly vs Hemingway Editor. Hemingway is free, browser-based and focused on readability (flagging passive voice, complex sentences, adverbs). For cover letters specifically, Hemingway is arguably better, because punchy writing is what you want. Grammarly catches more raw errors. Use Hemingway for voice, Grammarly for correctness.

Grammarly vs paid human editing. A decent freelance CV editor will cost you £60 to £150 for a one-off review. For that money, you get judgement, not just grammar, and someone who can tell you that “spearheaded” needs to come off page one. If you are only going to spend on one thing, spend on the human.

My verdict

Install free Grammarly today, skip Premium unless you genuinely cannot trust your own eye, and never accept a full-sentence rewrite without reading it out loud first.

FAQs

Is the free version of Grammarly enough for a cover letter? For grammar, spelling and punctuation, yes. It will catch the errors that get you binned. What it will not do is tell you that your opening is boring or that you have used “passionate” three times. For those, you need judgement, either your own or a human reviewer’s.

Does Grammarly weaken my writing voice? The free tier, rarely. The Premium rewrites, yes, often. Grammarly tends to smooth out specific, personal phrasing into generic corporate prose. The rule I give candidates: read every suggested rewrite out loud. If it sounds less like you, reject it.

Does Grammarly work for UK English? Yes, but only if you manually change the language setting to British English. By default it runs in American, which means it will try to change “specialise” to “specialize” and flag “CV” as unusual. Fix this the day you install it.

Does Grammarly spot over-used job application buzzwords? No. This is probably its biggest blind spot for job seekers. Words like “results-driven”, “spearheaded”, “leveraged”, “passionate” and “dynamic” are grammatically fine, so Grammarly leaves them alone. Recruiters, however, do not. You need a separate check for these.

Is Grammarly Premium worth it just for a job search? Maybe for one month. The tone detector on cover letters is genuinely useful, and if you are writing ten or more applications, the rewrites can occasionally unstick you. Subscribe monthly, use it intensively for four weeks, cancel. An annual Premium subscription for a two-week job search is bad economics.

Related reading

• The complete cover letter guide
• ChatGPT cover letter prompts that actually work
• LinkedIn optimisation for job seekers
• CV buzzwords recruiters hate
• Teal review: the job-tracker with built-in CV tools

Should you use Grammarly?

Yes, the free version, always. It is a 30-second install that protects you from the binary failure of a typo on page one. Change the language to British English the same day.

Premium is a maybe. If you are writing a lot of applications and you genuinely struggle with tone, one month of Premium can earn its keep. If you tend to over-trust tools and accept suggestions without thinking, skip it entirely and spend the money on a human reviewer instead.

The thing to remember is that Grammarly is a spellchecker with ambition, not a recruiter. It cannot tell you whether your cover letter is interesting, whether your CV opens strongly, or whether your LinkedIn headline will stop a hiring manager scrolling. Those are human judgements. Use Grammarly to clean up the basics so that the human judgement behind your application actually gets read.