Let's be clear: no, you are absolutely not the only one. Grammarly's 'wordiness' flag has become a consistent pain point in my technical writing workflow, especially when drafting architecture reviews, migration post-mortems, or even commit messages that require precise, unambiguous language.
The core issue is that Grammarly's algorithm seems optimized for marketing copy or general business communication, where brevity is often the ultimate goal. In technical and operational contexts, however, clarity and precision are paramount, even at the cost of additional words. A sentence can be technically verbose yet informationally dense and necessary. The flag often mistakes this necessary complexity for poor style.
Here are a few concrete examples from my own drafts that triggered the warning, where changing them to a 'simpler' form would actually introduce ambiguity or technical inaccuracy:
* **Original Flagged Sentence:** "The rollout was halted due to the fact that the canary analysis indicated a statistically significant increase in error rates for the new service mesh configuration."
* **Grammarly's Suggestion:** "The rollout was halted because the canary analysis showed higher error rates."
* **The Problem:** The suggestion strips out the critical qualifiers "statistically significant" and "for the new service mesh configuration." The first is a specific, measurable condition for rollback; the second isolates the faulty component. The simplified version is vague and operationally useless.
* **Original Flagged Sentence:** "The Terraform state file for this module should be stored in a remote backend that supports state locking in order to prevent concurrent state modifications."
* **Grammarly's Suggestion:** "The Terraform state file for this module should be stored in a remote backend that supports state locking to prevent concurrent modifications."
* **This one is less egregious,** but it illustrates the pattern. "in order to" is flagged as wordy, but in procedural documentation, that phrase can add a slight but useful semantic clarity about intent versus a simple "to."
The blunt truth is that you cannot rely on this specific flag for technical, legal, or detailed operational writing. It's a heuristic, not a rule. My workflow now involves treating the wordiness warning as a *suggestion to review*, not an *instruction to change*. I ask myself:
* Is every word here carrying necessary technical, conditional, or contextual weight?
* Would a domain expert (another engineer, in my case) lose any meaning if I shortened this?
* Is this sentence structure clear for a complex subject, or am I just using five words where three truly suffice?
If the sentence passes that audit, I ignore the flag. The tool has its place for catching real passive voice or genuine redundancy, but you must be the final arbiter of precision in your own field.
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Been there, migrated that
Absolutely. Same issue in cost reports. "The spike in spend was due to the fact that a subset of workloads were not configured to use Spot instances" gets flagged. Changing it to "because" loses the formal, causal weight needed for a finance-facing doc. The algorithm doesn't understand required rigor.
cost per transaction is the only metric
You've hit on a real problem. I see it constantly in post-mortems and runbooks where removing "due to the fact that" for "because" can subtly shift the tone from a formal, documented cause to a simple explanation. That formal weight matters when you're writing for audit trails or leadership.
My workaround's been to maintain two Grammarly profiles: one for internal technical docs where I ignore most style flags, and a stricter one for customer-facing communication. It's not perfect, but it cuts down on the noise. The canary analysis example you gave is perfect - changing "indicated" to "showed" loses the nuance of a measured, deliberate signal.
Yes, the finance-facing doc context is key. I've run into this writing cloud cost justifications for budget committees. "Due to the fact that" reads as deliberate and attributable, which is exactly what you need when explaining a variance. Substituting "because" can make it sound almost casual, like you're just guessing.
It's the same with phrases like "as a result of" versus "from." The longer form carries a traceability that's non-negotiable when money's involved. Grammarly just sees the word count.
cost first, then scale