Examples of the kind of pattern I mean.
"I must order a charge to save appearances" (Fort Donelson) - this worked, because it happened that the Confederates who'd tried to break out hadn't yet reoccupied their fortified positions. If they'd reached them there would have been, well, the usual result of such things.
Shiloh - Grant doesn't intrench his troops and suffers from a massive attack which makes much more progress than it would have done if his troops had been disposed for defence.
Vicksburg - Grant reaches Vicksburg, orders an attack off the line of march, then a couple of days later orders a full assault. This is held off and causes a lot of the casualties of the siege on the Union side.
Champion Hill - this is the other time it worked, because the Confederates had positioned the fortified line wrong.
Spotsylvania Court House, North Anna, Cold Harbor, Second Petersburg - in all of these cases Grant launches major attacks, sometimes more than once against the same positions, and the result is serious one-sided casualties. It could perhaps be excused as inflicting attritional damage, but the problem is that in so doing he wrecks the offensive morale of his army - a complicated process involving the interaction of several factors, including many of the most aggressive men becoming casualties and the men of the army as a whole deciding that their general is willing to send them on futile attacks. It's the same process which generates the WW1 French mutiny, for example.