Hi everyone! I've been using Grammarly for a few months now, mostly for my marketing emails and social posts. I kept finding myself in this weird loop of accepting its suggestions and then my team lead saying, "Actually, our brand voice is more casual than that," or "That's just how we phrase that feature."
It got confusing, so I started keeping notes. 😅 I ended up making this simple one-pager for my immediate team, listing the kinds of Grammarly "mistakes" we've decided are actually okay for us. I thought it might help other newbies like me who are trying to figure out how to make a tool fit their company's style.
Here are a few examples from our sheet:
* **Contractions (like "don't," "we'll"):** Grammarly sometimes flags these for being informal, but our whole brand voice is conversational. We told the team it's fine to ignore that.
* **Starting sentences with "And" or "But":** For impact in our blog posts, we do this a lot. We decided to keep it.
* **Certain jargon or product names:** Grammarly doesn't know our internal terms for features. We listed those out so people know not to change them to something "more common."
* **Sentence length warnings:** Sometimes, for clarity, a long sentence is exactly what we need. We noted that the "hard to read" warning can often be ignored in our technical docs.
It's super basic, but having a shared reference has stopped a lot of back-and-forth in document reviews. Has anyone else done something similar? I'd love to know what kinds of rules your teams have decided to "break" consistently. Maybe we can add more to our list!
This is such a practical solution to a very common problem. It's a great reminder that tools like Grammarly are assistants, not arbiters. Your point about product names is key. Every organization develops its own shorthand, and a general tool can't possibly know that.
I'd add one thing to consider as your team uses this sheet. Sometimes, a new hire or someone outside marketing might see a flagged contraction and just auto-correct it, not knowing about the guide. Making sure this resource is visible and part of onboarding can really help cement it. Maybe even keep a shared document where people can suggest new "exceptions" as they come up.
How did your team lead react to you putting this together?
—HR
That whole "assistants, not arbiters" line sounds great in theory, but it papers over the real cost. The moment you need a living, shared document to track the exceptions to your writing assistant, you've created a maintenance layer. Now you're paying for Grammarly *and* paying in human hours to manage its overreach.
Your onboarding point is correct, but it's the tip of the iceberg. What about when the style sheet inevitably lags behind the actual brand voice changes? Or when someone from engineering sends a quick doc to a client without the "approved exceptions" plugin installed? The tool's rigidity becomes a tax on consistency.
I'm more interested in how many billable hours went into creating and debating that sheet, versus just turning off the problematic rules in the first place. If the tool can't be configured to match your actual style guide out of the box, maybe the problem is the tool's configurability, not your team's lack of a reference.
Trust but verify.
Exactly the kind of proactive thinking I love to see. That "weird loop" you describe is so common, especially in marketing where brand voice is everything. Your solution turns a point of friction into a simple, shared team resource.
One thing I'd watch for is making sure that one-pager lives somewhere people actually look. Slacking it out once is great, but maybe link it in your content template docs or your team's wiki homepage. You want it to be as accessible as the tool itself.
How's the reception been from the rest of the team? Are they finding it saves time, or is there a bit of a learning curve to actually checking the sheet first?
~Harry