AI-powered grammar checkers and proofreaders such as Grammarly have become ubiquitous. To be fair, for the routine review of typos, spelling errors, and other obvious writing defects, these tools can be useful.

Once in a while, a valued client will take a piece I’ve edited or ghostwritten and run it through Grammarly. This is to check up on my work, I suppose. Because I have confidence in the quality of the manuscripts I deliver, I have no problem with that. But there’s one annoying change that Grammarly always insists upon. If you say something like, “When your plan is complete, the next step is to take action,” the algorithm will always demand that you change the idiom “take action” to “act.” It wants you to say, “When your plan is complete, the next step is to act.” There are no exceptions.

I don’t like this. First of all, “act” sounds inelegant and abrupt. As the final word in the sentence, it feels incomplete, like someone snipped away the last phrase. But more importantly, the verb “to act” has many meanings. One of the most widely used is “to perform dramatically,” such as, “I want to act in the play, and I hope the director will cast me as Hamlet.” It also means to behave in a certain way, often with a lack of sincerity, such as, “He always seems to act friendly, even when he’s spreading the most vile gossip.” And there’s the usage currently in vogue with harried parents: “When Jimmy eats too much sugary food, he starts to act out.”

That Split-Second Pause of Confusion

Personally, I believe the author should strive to make the reading experience as seamless and smooth as possible. (Not all authors share this view! Many of the more literary sort delight in making the reader navigate an obstacle course of dense and tangled syntax.) When I read something like, “When the situation becomes dangerous, it’s time to act,” I involuntarily stop and scratch my head. It’s time to act? What exactly does that mean?

That split-second pause of confusion is not what you want. It puts the brakes on your reader and introduces tension.

I believe that the idiom “take action” is quite useful. It has only one meaning: It’s time to do something, and to go from being passive to being kinetic. It means to change the current situation and get a different result. I’ll admit the verb “take” is imprecise. Maybe it should be more exact, such as “initiate action.” But that sounds too formal, like military jargon. And that’s what an idiom is: It may not stand up to close scrutiny, but it works because we all agree it works.

Somewhere, at some time, the person teaching the Grammarly AI algorithm instructed it to reject “to take action” and replace it with “to act.” Sorry – this human editor begs to differ, and when I see such a change, I take action!