The Daily Hallucination

SAN FRANCISCO — An IT administrator who attempted to cancel his company's Grammarly Business subscription on Tuesday reported that the action triggered emails to all 1,400 of the company's employees, each of whom was asked, in warm and grammatically flawless language, whether they were ready to lose their words.

"I wanted to stop paying for a writing assistant," said the administrator, Casimir Oyelaran-Holt, of Minneapolis. "Instead, the writing assistant wrote to everyone I work with. My mother-in-law's cousin works in facilities here. She got one. She called me."

The messages, which employees forwarded to Oyelaran-Holt in large numbers throughout the afternoon, informed recipients that their "clarity, confidence and delivery" were at risk and invited them to "let your admin know how you feel." According to an internal tally, 312 employees did.

"Retention is about relationships," said a product marketing manager at a competing writing tool, who said she had studied the flow closely and with admiration. "When a business tries to leave, you do not argue with the business. You go around the business, to the business's people, and you make them sad in a professional tone."

The emails were well received on linguistic grounds. An analysis by the readability firm Parsewell found that the messages scored 94 out of 100 for tone and contained zero passive-voice constructions, except in the sentence "Your access will be removed," which the firm called "the one place it was needed."

Oyelaran-Holt said the cancellation did eventually go through, after a confirmation screen, a second confirmation screen and a short survey asking him to describe, in 50 words or fewer, "what went wrong between us."

At press time, a suggestion had appeared beneath his reply-all apology recommending he replace "I'm so sorry about this" with "I apologize for any confusion."