Will Grammarly get my essay flagged as AI by Turnitin? ESL student really stressed
Hi everyone. I’m an international student in my second year at university, and English is not my first language. I spend a lot of time writing my essays carefully, then revising them multiple times on my own. After that, I usually use Grammarly to help fix small grammar mistakes like verb tense errors, missing articles, awkward wording, or punctuation. Sometimes I also ask a friend to read my paper and tell me if any sentence sounds confusing.
I do not use ChatGPT or AI tools to generate ideas, paragraphs, or entire essays. I write everything myself. The only thing I use is grammar correction because I’m still learning academic English and I don’t want simple language mistakes to affect my grades.
Today my professor said all assignments will be checked by Turnitin for both plagiarism and AI-generated writing. Now I’m honestly panicking a little. I’m worried that even normal grammar corrections could make my paper look “AI-written,” especially because the corrected version sounds cleaner than my original draft.
For example, Grammarly changes things like:
- “in my opinion, it show” → “in my opinion, it shows”
- “students has many stress” → “students have a lot of stress”
These are small fixes, but now I’m scared to even use them.
The syllabus says AI-generated writing is prohibited, but it doesn’t clearly mention grammar tools. I emailed my professor for clarification, but the deadline is tomorrow night and I still haven’t gotten a response.
Has anyone here used Grammarly or similar grammar checkers and still submitted safely through Turnitin? Have you ever had problems with false AI flags because of editing tools? I’m trying very hard to follow the rules and avoid any academic misconduct issues.
Any advice would really help. Thank you.