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Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

writewithharper.com

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Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#71

Post by InsideOutSanta »

icapybara wrote: post #24

Why wouldn't you want an LLM for a language learning tool? Language is one of things I would trust an LLM completely on. Have you ever seen ChatGPT make an English mistake?

Yeah, I agree. An open-source LLM-based grammar checker with a user interface similar to Grammarly is probably what I'm looking for. It doesn't need to be perfect (none of the options are); it just needs to help me become a better writer by pointing out issues in my text. I can ignore the false positives, and as long as it helps improve my text, I don't mind if it doesn't catch every single issue.

Using an LLM would also help make it multilingual. Both Grammarly and Harper only support English and will likely never support more than a few dozen very popular languages. LLMs could help cover a much wider range of languages.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#72

Post by InsideOutSanta »

lurk2 wrote: post #55

Who is the target market is for Grammarly? Working professionals who speak English as a second language?

“Think of how poorly the average person writes, and realize half of them write worse than that.”

(George Carlin or something, quote's veracity depends on what you mean by “average.”)

I think everybody could benefit from having something like Grammarly on their computer. None of us writes perfectly, and it's always beneficial to strive for improvement.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#73

Post by InsideOutSanta »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #66
lurk2 wrote: post #55

Who is the target market is for Grammarly? Working professionals who speak English as a second language?

I think it is anyone who wanna make sure they write correctly. I know for example David Sparks (MacSparky https://www.macsparky.com ) uses it (or at leased used it). And he was an American lawyer and he says writing has been his passion his whole life so I assume his English is better than the average person.

Adam Engst from TidBITs, a person whose job has been writing things for all his life, also uses Grammarly:

https://tidbits.com/2025/01/30/why-grammarly-beats-apples-wr...

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#74

Post by v5v3 »

I used to see ads for Grammarly and wondered if anyone was using it.

Then post COVID with the increase in screen sharing video calls, I soon realised nearly every non-native English speaker from countries around the world heavily relied on it in their jobs. As I could see it installed when people share screens.

Huge market, good luck.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#76

Post by NoboruWataya »

o11c wrote: post #34
healsdata wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grammarly is all in on AI and recently started recommended splitting "wasn't" and added the contraction to the word it modified. Example: "truly wasn't" becomes "was trulyn't" https://imgur.com/a/RQZ2wXA

Hm ... I wonder, is Grammarly also responsible for the flood of contraction of lexical "have" the last few years? It's standard in British English, but outside of poetry it is proscribed in almost all other dialects (which only permit contraction of auxiliary "have"). Even in British I'm not sure how widely they actually use it - do they say "I've a car" and "I haven't a car"?

In my experience "I've a car" is much more common than "I haven't a car" (I've never heard the latter construct used, but regularly hear the former in casual speech). "I haven't got a car" or "I've no car" would be relatively common though.

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#78

Post by SilverSlash »

akazantsev wrote: post #62
m00dy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who haven't heard of LLMs

LLMs are not nice to use for spell checking. I do not want to read a wall of text from LLM just to find a missed article somewhere and I want to receive feedback as I type. Also, once I asked LLM to check the message. It said everything looked fine and made a copy of the message in its response with one sentence in the middle removed.

I haven't used Grammarly but for simple things like spelling mistakes, missed articles, or punctuation, wouldn't even Google Docs be enough?

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#79

Post by Veen »

lurk2 wrote: post #55

Who is the target market is for Grammarly? Working professionals who speak English as a second language?

I use it as a proofreader, not to improve my writing. It’s difficult to proofread your own work, and Grammarly is a useful assistant. Plus, I’m British and I often write on behalf of American clients. I’m pretty good at following US English standards because I’ve been doing it for a long time, but the odd Britishism slips through and Grammarly usually catches it (although a standard spell checker would too, I suppose).

Re: Harper – an open-source alternative to Grammarly

#80

Post by Veen »

dartharva wrote: post #47

I never understood the appeal of grammar tools. If you have reached the minimum professional/academic level needed to be designated to write something, shouldn't you at least be capable of verifying its semantic "correctness" just by reading through it once yourself? Why would you pass a writing job to someone who isn't 100% fluent in the language and then make up for it by buying complex tools?

People are bad at proofreading their own work. Professional writers often use third-party copy editors and proofreaders for that reason.
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