Is there a difference between dreamed and dreamt? You might be surprised to find conflicting reports. Some people say that there is no difference. Others say that the two words have different meanings. What’s the real deal?
Dreamt and dreamed are both past tense forms of dream. Dreamt is more common in Britain, while dreamed is more common in other English-speaking countries, including the U.S.
Being someone’s bff does not mean you’re part of a club with only two members. It does, however, mean that you have a very close friend.
Bff is an initialism of the phrase best friend(s) forever, and it’s a term of endearment used for selected close friends.
By Sophorn Chhay
Just because you have room for 160 characters in your texts doesn’t mean you should use them all.
In fact, texting experts seem to agree that an ideal text should be short and sweet, especially in a business environment, where the name of the game is brevity. Essentially, focus on quality, not quantity.
This can sometimes be a challenge for people who enjoy being verbose.
Guest post from Scott Yates
Abbreviations and acronyms have embedded themselves in English as somewhat of an auxiliary language. If you thought Latin was a dead language, it isn’t. It lives somewhat zombie-like in some very common abbreviations like, e.g., i.e., etc.
(Notice how the “etc.” in that last sentence did double-duty there? No extra charge for that. đŸ˜‰
(Same goes for the double-duty parenthesis at the end of the last parenthetical winky-face.)
By David at EssaysCoach.com
Within your college application, your personal statement is your one opportunity for the admissions officer to “meet you”, to visualize the person behind the numbers. While no essay can save an unqualified application, an outstanding essay can push an otherwise mediocre application into the “yes” pile.
However, writing a good application essay is hard.
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Are you curious how all the celebrities did? Learn more about our #GrammarDay MVPs in our recent study.
So, you want to know what your English grammar level is? You’ve come to the right place. This post will cover the answers and additional learning resources for “Grammar Skills Test—Starter.” The Starter test covers Question formation, verb tense, prepositions, subject-verb agreement, and word order.
Correct answers are highlighted. Links go to additional learning resources to help you continue improving.
Have you seen check spelled cheque? You might have wondered whether it was a spelling error or a new word that you don’t know. Let’s look into this word and how it differs from check.
The possessive case shows ownership. With the addition of ’s (or sometimes just the apostrophe), a noun can change from a simple person, place, or thing to a person, place, or thing that owns something. There are a few different ways to form the possessive of a noun. We’ll discuss these ways below.
If the noun doesn’t end with an s, add ’s to the end of the noun. See the following examples:
How should you spell the past tense of the verb label? After adding the -ed ending, should you double the L? Speakers of American English might answer differently than speakers of British English.
“Vampires! Zombies! Werewolves!” “Where?!” “Behind you!”
Thank goodness for prepositions. Imagine not knowing where the danger lay!
Prepositions tell us where or when something is in relation to something else. When monsters are sneaking up on you, it is good to have these special words to tell us where those monsters are. Are they behind us or in front of us; are they near or far; will they be arriving in three seconds or at midnight?
We are “devolving” into lackadaisical proofreaders.
Even senior management and professionals with advanced degrees and experience no longer show the stamina or desire to ensure that their written words convey exactly what they are meant to–and our carelessness is coming to a head.
This is compounded by the fact that, more than ever, human beings are being judged on word choice.
Grammar is cool now (it’s still cool, right?) so it’s okay to wave your red pen in the air like you just don’t care. Take the quiz below and find out just how much of a word nerd you really are. Give yourself a point for each statement you agree with.
Guest Post from Leslie Anglesey, Professor at California State University, Sacramento
Writing an application essay is no easy task, but reading it should be. College admission boards consider a number of things when reviewing an application. While most students understand the importance of extra-curricular activities and GPAs, the admission essay often gets overlooked.
By Laura Wallis for The Stir by CafeMom
And other things your kids will ask to make you feel old
A friend recently mentioned that her child, upon picking up a landline phone, asked, “Mom, what is that sound?” It was a dial tone. The speed at which technology is advancing means that many once-basic details of everyday life are quickly going the way of the dinosaur.
By Nelson Lauver, Author of Most Un-Likely To Succeed
I’m nervous and thinking about turning around and getting back in my car. Just ring the doorbell, I tell myself. I find the courage, and my blind date answers the door with one hand while holding back Lola, an exuberant 80-pound rescued pit bull mix, with the other. I can’t believe my eyes! Jane could be a model. She’s stunning, with a movie-star smile.
So, you want to know what your English grammar level is? You’ve come to the right place. This post will cover the answers and additional learning resources for “Grammar Skills Test—Master.” The Master test covers reported speech, conditionals, prepositions, tenses, adverbs vs. adjectives, the irrealis mood, and restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses.
Correct answers are highlighted.
While some of the phrases used in text speak originated in that medium, others, like ikr, are adopted from everyday life.
Ikr is an abbreviation for the phrase “I know, right.” The phrase first appeared during the early 1990s, and its first uses in electronic communication can be traced back to at least 2004.
This poll is part of a series that Grammarly is running aimed at better understanding how the public feels about writing, language learning, and grammar.
Please take the poll and share your thoughts in the comments. We can’t wait to hear from you!
If you are interested in more, check out last week’s poll.
Scholarship prompts:
Who is eligible to participate? Participants in Grammarly’s scholarship contest must be residents of the United States (excluding Puerto Rico). In addition, each participant must either be:
Grammarly will award the scholarship directly to the accredited institution.
Do you know what a dord is? No? Well, don’t try looking it up in the dictionary, unless the dictionary is Webster’s Second New International Dictionary of 1934. This strange little word appeared only in that one edition, and it spent a whole five years there, happily, before being discovered as a fake. You see, “dord” isn’t a real word, even though it appeared in a dictionary.
This poll is part of a series that Grammarly is running aimed at better understanding how the public feels about writing, language learning, and grammar.
Please take the poll and share your thoughts in the comments. We can’t wait to hear from you!
If you are interested in more, check out last week’s poll.
For the most part, you can use either enquire or inquire and not make a mistake.
Guest post by Erik Bowitz
Grammarly is widely known in the United States as an extremely useful tool for writers looking to quickly and easily write error-free prose. However, there is an even larger, and much less talked about group of writers who are equally enthusiastic about the opportunities Grammarly’s automated proofreader provides: English as a Second Language (ESL) writers.
When singers use backing tracks to sing less (or not at all) during a performance, they have to do what is called “lip singing”—mouthing the words without actually making sound. Old-timer’s disease is a terrible illness that affects people’s ability to think, remember, and control their behavior. A mute point is an issue that could be argued, but could also have very little consequence.
Guest Post by Doug Sprei and Jules Johnson, LearningAlly.org
For many people with dyslexia, writing and spelling are some of the most challenging activities in daily life. And yet in the midst of this difficulty, a world of creative thinking is awakened. Some of the most acclaimed authors, business leaders, scientists, and innovators are dyslexic. The next time you switch on a light bulb or reach for a favorite book, consider the following reasons that dyslexia is something to be celebrated.
Guest post from Nick Marquet
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
If you are a writer, your goal is probably for your work to be consumed by an interested audience who will rave about it to their friends. Yet, if you write the most insightful, thought-provoking, earth-shattering blog post or newspaper article — and no one reads it – it’s not very likely that your writing will resonate with a wide audience.
If you don’t like to follow the rules, style guides are a necessary evil. They give uniformity and structure to writing and are an invaluable resource when writing papers in university; the skill of writing according to a style guide will also help you in your career. They teach you how to avoid plagiarism by correctly citing works that you’ve read and obtained information from.
If you missed our March #GrammarlyChat, get caught up with our Storify summary: https://storify.com/Grammarly/grammarlychat-blogging-and-self-publishing.
If you missed our February #GrammarlyChat, get caught up with our Storify summary: https://storify.com/Grammarly/grammarlychat-writing-for-work-and-job-searching.
If you missed our January #GrammarlyChat about books and reading, get caught up with our Storify summary: https://storify.com/Grammarly/grammarly-chat-books-and-reading
At a professional conference in 2014, Clive Thompson, a writer for The New York Times Magazine, presented “The Pencil and the Keyboard: How The Way You Write Changes the Way You Think.” In this session, he claimed that handwriting was better than typing in certain situations and vice versa. One attendee, Eric Peters, decided to explore the issue further in the article “Keyboard vs.
Guest post by Robert McCauley
Job seekers receive no shortage of advice from colleagues, peers, friends, and family. Everyone has some nugget of wisdom to help you land the position. Of all the tips you’re likely to receive, this one may be the most valuable: Dot your i’s and cross your t’s.
What does having strong attention to detail have to do with finding a job?
In the month of February, Americans place a special emphasis on the achievements and history of black Americans, or Americans of African descent. Each year, a theme promotes one facet of black heritage. This year, 2016, the theme is “Hallowed Grounds: Sites of African American Memories.” The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) website explains, “From port cities where Africans disembarked from slave ships to the battlefields where their descendants fought for freedom, from the colleges and universities where they pursued education to places where they created communities during centuries of migration, the imprint of Americans of African descent is deeply embedded in the narrative of the American past.
There’s only one way you can spell the adverb preferably. You can’t add another “f,” “r,” or “l”—there’s really no need to do it.
Let’s be honest here—mistakes happen to the best of us. We’d have a hard time finding a writer who, at some point, didn’t miswrite “the” as “hte” or “teh.” In haste, it might also be possible to mistake “to” for “too,” or “their” for “they’re.” And that’s perfectly fine, as long as you go over your work, notice your mistakes, and fix them.
Let’s face it: Sometimes the English language can be downright bizarre. The plural of ox is oxen while the plural of box is boxes, ‘rough’ rhymes with ‘gruff’ even though the two words only have two letters in common, and there are actually more than nine hundred exceptions to the infamous “i before e except after c” rule.
If you’re still not convinced that the English language is full of oddities and conundrums, take a look at these five wacky sentences that are actually grammatically correct.
It feels the same every year: you set some goals for yourself, the year starts with the best of intentions, but then it’s October and you are looking at a partially completed goal and feeling pretty frustrated with yourself. It happens to everyone—literally. But not everyone struggles all the time. Here are twelve ways that your mind is sabotaging your goals and some approaches to getting your head right.
When people are learning a language, often they learn the names of delicious foods. English has adopted the names of many Chinese dishes. However, you may be surprised to realize that many other everyday words and phrases are also borrowed from various dialects of Chinese.
Bok choy is an Asian green that can be cooked or eaten raw. In Chinese, the expression derives from words meaning “white vegetable” because of the white stalks.
“They all know. It’s only a matter of time until I’m called out. I’m a fraud.”
How many times has a similar line of thought traipsed seductively through your consciousness? An estimated 70 percent of us will likely experience at some point the feelings of inadequacy and “fakeness” that accompany imposter syndrome.
While people who experience imposter syndrome—feelings of failure and “pretending”—often experience higher rates of burnout, job dissatisfaction, and stagnancy, they also tend to be successful, as researcher Valerie Young shows.
Writing job applications is a necessary evil that awaits most of us. On the plus side, applications allow us to reach for the stars—or at least for employers we would never be able to reach through recommendations or word of mouth. On the flip side, they offer the same opportunity to hundreds of other people who are also looking for a job. To make matters even worse, in this day and age you can’t use the same rĂ©sumĂ© and cover letter for every job post you see.
Ever make an embarrassing grammatical mistake that other people judged you for? Of course you have; we’ve all made grammatical errors at some point. Now, imagine being stuck with one of those mistakes for the rest of your life. Believe it or not, people get misspelled or grammatically incorrect tattoos more often than you could imagine. How hard is it to do a quick Google search before permanently writing your biggest mistake ever? (Pretty difficult, apparently.)
by Alison Doyle, Job Search Expert, About.com
Whether you’re sending an email for work or writing a cover letter for a resumĂ©, it’s important to remember that this is professional writing, not personal. Your writing ability reflects on you as an employee or a prospective employee.
It’s important to take the time to carefully write, edit and proofread all your correspondence before you click Send or upload a document online.
English is already the most common second language (by number of speakers) in the world, and more people begin studying it every day. Fortunately, the availability of learning resources is growing right along with the number of English learners. The publishing industry, web entrepreneurs, respected institutions, and enthusiasts who just want to help are producing a staggering amount of materials aimed at getting people to understand, speak, and write in English.
Guest Post By Akmal Akbarov at EnglishClubPro.com
Have you ever been in this situation? You meet with your friend, start the conversation, and suddenly stop because you can’t remember a certain word.
Or here is another situation. You may be abroad. You go to a shop and either don’t remember or simply don’t know the exact the word for this “tool you need for that certain thing that you have to do with the other thing.”
Something great happened on March 4, 2008. Martha Brockenbrough, through The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, established National Grammar Day in the United States. It’s a day to celebrate all that grammar does. Would you like to wish your friends a Happy Grammar Day? Make sure you don’t have any errors in your messages! How can you make sure your grammar is in tip-top shape?
This poll is part of a series that Grammarly is running aimed at better understanding how the public feels about writing, language learning, and grammar.
Please take the poll and share your thoughts in the comments. We can’t wait to hear from you!
If you are interested in more, check out last week’s poll.
By Laura Wallis for The Stir by CafeMom
All parents have mental lists of this stuff—their kids’ hilarious mispronunciations and malapropisms that were so darn cute they couldn’t bear to set them straight. We polled a bunch of parents for some of their favorite examples.
By the way, this is what baby books were made for: Enjoy the quirks and write them down before you forget. (Or, even better, make some audio recordings!) There’s plenty of time for corrections later.
In mathematical language, a transformation changes a form without changing its value. If that doesn’t mean much to you, let Sal explain it to you in a short video complete with examples and diagrams. Salman (Sal) Khan is the founder of Khan Academy, an online academy that offers math, science, art, and other courses free of charge. Though there are no English grammar classes yet, students seeking to sharpen their skills can still benefit from the academy’s offerings.
Guest post by Matt Banner
It doesn’t matter if you’re a New York Times bestselling author or a blogger from Kansas, everyone has to edit their work. The first draft is always a mess of disorganized thoughts and uncertain tangents. Writing begins as chaos and ends with order. It has been this way since the dawn of time.
Saving time while also polishing your work is every writer’s goal.
Whether fun or more fun is correct seems like a simple question, but the answer isn’t exactly straightforward. To understand, you must examine the background of the word fun. Let’s get started.
Have you mastered these basic grammar rules? If you’d like to answer yes, review your knowledge with the articles below. You might be surprised at how many rules you remember and how many rules you still need to learn.
The nouns that pronouns replace are antecedents. The antecedents must correspond to the nouns they refer to in gender and number.
What are some of the most commonly confused phrases in English and how can you say them correctly?
Purposely and purposefully are two English words that are often confused. Because they both have the same root, purpose, are both adverbs, and are only a shade apart in meaning, it is no wonder that they are used incorrectly with such frequency.
Here’s how to use them.
When you use purposely in a sentence, it should be synonymous with intentionally and on purpose.
For many book lovers, reading in bed is one of life’s greatest pleasures. In order to enjoy the experience to the fullest, it’s important to choose the right book for the right time. Here are three books we recommend reading in bed.
When you want to stay in bed longer: His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman Although this series is written for children, it’s a pleasure to read as an adult.
I want to put a ding in the universe.
—Steve Jobs
You don’t have to be a fan of iEverything to recognize the tremendous impact Apple has had on technology and business. Steve Jobs led the company he co-founded in 1976 with charisma and an insatiable drive to innovate and succeed. When Jobs died in 2011, he left a legacy that will continue to shape our world for generations.
San Francisco, Calif. — Most consumer Internet startups focus on gaining funding, accessing top talent, or providing Google-esque perks, but a Bay Area automated proofreading company is navigating a different set of issues.
“I am terrified to send emails,” said a team member at Grammarly.com. “Because I work with a company dedicated to improving written communication, all of my email is subject to intense scrutiny.
Wouldn’t it be embarrassing to have a spelling error in a letter of apology? And it’s even more cringe-worthy if the word you spell wrong is one of the key elements of your message! So before you say you’re sorry, find out whether apologize or apologise is the right word.
You don’t have to be a bachelor to get a bachelor’s degree, but you do need to demonstrate mastery to get a master’s degree.
By Akmal Akbarov
Do you have a problem with the passive voice? Do you know the difference between the passive and active voices?
Well, you don’t have to worry any longer because I have created this article just for you.
If you scroll down, you will see that I have taken one sentence and showed you how to write it in both the active and passive voices.
In the active voice your sentences usually follow this formula:
Your teacher hands you a graded essay. What do you look at first? Most college students turn their attention to the letter grade or percentage score. If it’s high, they are happy. If it’s low, they are disappointed. Many students end the review process at this point. What about you? If you want to write better essays, you will need to understand the criteria teachers use to score them.
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re either a writer or a person who frequently comes into contact with the written word. You might be a journalist who writes articles, a blogger who writes blog posts, a student who writes term papers, or an activist who writes grant proposals. As long as your life includes at least an occasional putting of a pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, you know how important it is to proofread everything you write.
A restrictive clause modifies the noun that precedes it in an essential way. Restrictive clauses limit or identify such nouns and cannot be removed from a sentence without changing the sentence’s meaning. A nonrestrictive clause, on the other hand, describes a noun in a nonessential way.
The terminology in this area of grammar can be confusing, so let’s get that out of the way.
