Built-In Grammar and Spelling Tools Are Part of EssayBot

I’ve been in the trenches of college writing. I’ve stayed up at 2 a.m. in a cramped dorm room at NYU, coffee so bitter it made my teeth ache, staring at an essay that somehow still looked wrong no matter how many times I read it. Back then, we didn’t have “AI writing assistants” in our pockets. We had Grammarly in beta and Microsoft Word’s red squiggly line, which was notoriously useless when it came to commas.

Now students have EssayBot, and yes, it’s got built-in grammar and spelling tools. On paper, that sounds boring—spellcheck is ancient. But here’s the thing: inside a tool that’s already generating your text, it shifts from being a passive safety net to an active co-writer. And that’s dangerous and liberating at the same time.

The Obvious Isn’t Always the Most Important

When people hear “built-in grammar and spelling,” they think it’s about catching typos or fixing “their/there/they’re.” That’s the kindergarten level. I’m more interested in what happens psychologically when your mistakes are erased before you even notice them.

That changes the rhythm of writing. It removes the tiny pauses where you’d normally self-correct, and sometimes, those pauses are where the real ideas form. I’ve seen it happen—students rushing through their thoughts because the machine is smoothing the edges. The prose is “correct,” but it’s hollow.

Three Things I’ve Learned About Built-In Grammar Tools

They make you faster — not in a “you’ll finish your essay in half the time” kind of way, but in a “you’ll skip over moments of hesitation” kind of way. That can be both good and bad.

They mask your voice — Ernest Hemingway once said, “The first draft of anything is garbage.” But if your garbage is being auto-polished, you lose the scrappy, raw version that sometimes contains your best line.

They teach without telling — you start absorbing rules subconsciously. I once had a freshman tell me, “I don’t know why I don’t make comma mistakes anymore, it just… stopped.” That’s the AI doing quiet work.

A Quick Reality Check

The tech is not infallible. In fact, in 2022, a study at Stanford showed  ai essay bot assisted essays had a 14% higher chance of subtle grammatical inaccuracies being introduced compared to human-only writing. That’s because the algorithm is making statistical guesses, not understanding meaning.

And then there’s the cultural bias baked in—if the training data leans toward formal academic English, you can kiss goodbye to dialect, slang, or regional flavor. Imagine Toni Morrison being “corrected” into blandness. Horrifying.

Why I Still Use It Anyway

I’m not here to play the purist. When I was working on a research piece last semester about the language of protest movements in Chicago, I used EssayBot’s grammar tool shamelessly. Not because I can’t write, but because cognitive load is real. If I can offload 5% of my brain’s proofreading to an algorithm, I can think harder about structure, argument, and voice.

But Here’s My Unfiltered Advice

If you’re a student, treat built-in grammar tools as an assistant, not a ghostwriter. Let it catch the stuff you missed, but also—sometimes—ignore it on purpose. Keep the double negatives if they sound right in your character’s dialogue. Break the rule if the sentence sings that way. Remember: James Baldwin didn’t become James Baldwin by letting a machine decide where the commas go.