Writing Suggestions

Writing suggestions are the main way Grammarly delivers communication assistance. As a user is writing, underlined text indicates that Grammarly has a suggestion. Clicking on an underline brings up a card to view, apply, or dismiss the suggestion. For more on the user experience, check out Grammarly UX, or try it yourself in our demo.

By integrating the Grammarly Text Editor SDK with your app, you can automatically provide your users with Grammarly’s suggestions as they write in your app’s text fields. They won’t need to sign up for a Grammarly account to see these suggestions, though they can always connect their account for a more personalized experience.

Types of writing suggestions

Grammarly offers extensive writing suggestions covering four categories of communication needs: correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery.

Apps on the Lifetime Free plan will get suggestions for correctness, while apps on the Plus plan will get all four types of suggestions.

• Correctness: Identify and resolve mistakes with writing mechanics like grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Mistake-free writing helps users come across as credible and professional.
• Clarity: Make sentences easier to read and understand. By reducing wordiness and complexity in your users’ messages, these suggestions minimize miscommunications.
• Engagement: Improve vocabulary and variety, making writing more captivating and fun to read. Examples include pointing out monotonous phrases and suggesting synonyms for overused words.
• Delivery: Help users craft their messages with the appropriate formality, politeness, and confidence. These suggestions highlight word choices that can make the tone of the message more effective for the writer’s audience.

Logic for showing suggestions

Grammarly analyzes text using AI and linguistic knowledge to come up with potential writing suggestions to show. Whether a writing suggestion is shown to the user depends on the following:

• Is the suggestion type included in your app’s plan? Suggestions for correctness are included in the Lifetime Free plan, while suggestions for clarity, delivery, and engagement are only available on the Plus plan.
• Is the suggestion valid for the document dialect? This represents the kind of English (e.g. British English, American English) that the text uses.
• Is the suggestion valid for the document domain? This is the type of writing that the user is doing.
• Is the suggestion category turned off or on? Some specific kinds of suggestions, like whether to suggest an Oxford comma, are muted by default. Apps on the Plus plan can configure suggestion categories.
• Is an application dictionary being used? Words that have been added to that dictionary won't be flagged as misspelled.
• Has the user connected their account? If so, their account details—like their dismissed suggestions, document domain, dialect, and whether they are a Grammarly Premium or Grammarly Business user—will override the SDK configuration in determining which suggestions are shown. For example, a Grammarly Premium user who connects their account will get suggestions for clarity, engagement, and delivery even if your app is on the Lifetime Free plan.
• Does the user have a personal or organizational dictionary? If the user has connected their account, any words that are part of either their personal dictionary or organizational dictionary (for Grammarly Business users) will not be flagged as misspelled.

Document dialect

By default, Grammarly sets the English dialect of a user according to their browser's preferred language settingopen in new window, but if you already have a good idea, then it's best to specify it using documentDialect.

Note that the user can always override the dialect via the Grammarly button menu:

• To learn more about configuring document dialect, check out the example on GitHubopen in new window.
• To view the reference page, check out dialect.

Document domain

If you’re composing an email, you may want different writing suggestions than if you’re working on an academic paper. The DocumentDomain EditorConfig property allows apps to choose from six writing types to tailor writing suggestions to the user’s context.

Note that users who connect their Grammarly account can set a domain for their writingopen in new window, overriding the configuration in the SDK.

• To learn more about configuring document domain, check out the example on GitHubopen in new window.
• To view the reference page, check out domain.

Suggestion categories

Configuring suggestion categories is only available for apps on the Plus plan.

To allow for a range of stylistic and editorial preferences, the Text Editor SDK exposes the SuggestionCategories EditorConfig property. This allows apps on the Plus plan to turn on or off specific kinds of suggestions.

In the API reference, you can observe that certain categories are turned off (“muted”) by default in the SDK, because these suggestions may not apply to all users and all types of writing.

• To learn more about configuring suggestion categories, check out the example on GitHubopen in new window.
• To view the reference page, check out suggestionCategories.