The passive voice is often maligned by grammazons as a bad writing habit. Or, to put it in the active voice, grammazons across the English-speaking world malign the passive voice as a bad writing habit.
In general, the active voice makes your writing stronger, more direct, and, you guessed it, more active. The subject is something, or it does the action of the verb in the sentence.
Apostrophes can be tricky. Sometimes they form possessives. Sometimes they form contractions. Can they ever make something plural?
A contraction is a shortened form of a word (or group of words) that omits certain letters or sounds. In a contraction, an apostrophe represents missing letters. The most common contractions are made up of verbs, auxiliaries, or modals attached to other words: He would=He’d.
For a while now, we’ve been working on improvements for Grammarly Insights based on your feedback. But until recently, this was an undercover job.
So, it’s with great jubilation that we reveal some big changes making their way to your inbox next week.
1 Monitor Your Trends
Until now, the weekly emails summarized your activity over the previous seven days. Moving forward, we will graph up to four weeks’ worth of progress in the Productivity, Mastery, and Vocabulary sections.
During your job interview, your prospective employer is likely to ask you some behavioral questions. Unlike job-related questions that focus on past performance, behavioral questions help the employer get a better feel for who you are and how you’ll carry yourself on the job.
Here are some of the common behavioral interview questions you can expect, with advice and examples to help you answer them.
The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written. — Joyce Carol Oates
With 2016 coming to a close, Grammarly’s team of writing analysts took a look at the biggest trends in writing in English this year. And we found some fascinating results! Below are the grammar and writing trends that dominated 2016, as well as our predictions for the next year in written English.
A great restaurant review can point you toward your new favorite spot—or help you avoid a dining disaster. Review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor have an abundance of restaurant reviews to browse, but if you spend any time on these sites you’ll notice not all reviews are helpful.
Some reviews are positive, but are so vague that you question their legitimacy. Some might have helpful information, but are so poorly written they’re unintelligible.
Pronouns are words that stand in for a noun in a sentence. Whenever pronouns are used, it should be unmistakably clear which noun the pronoun is standing in for. A faulty pronoun reference will result in a muddled sentence and a confused reader.
A pronoun is like an actor’s double on a movie set: it is a simplified version of the noun it is standing in for.
Whether you like the tiny emotion-pictures or despise them, emojis are heavily used throughout messaging apps.
If you’re new to emojis, or you’ve long been expressing your joy with crying smiling faces and your sass with reception desk workers, you can up your game. Check out these tips to make your texts as emoji-filled as possible.
Emojis may not be language, but some of the more commonly used symbols do have accepted meanings.
For the third day of LitMas, we’re offering you three French phrases English speakers love to borrow. There’s something kind of glamorous about sprinkling foreign phrases into your conversations every now and then, don’t you think?
1 Joyeux Noël
’Tis the season of wondering what noel means. In French, Noël simply means Christmas. If you’re not sure about joyeux, go ahead and take a guess—you’re probably right.
Feeling under the weather? Walking on thin ice with your vocabulary variety? These idioms will have a snowball effect on your language use this winter. And they’re just the tip of the iceberg.
If you’re going to tell someone to calm down, why not do it in rhyme? “Chill” means a feeling of coldness, as in, “there was a chill in the air.” Sometime in recent decades, probably the 1970s, the word also came to mean “relax”—just imagine a hippie flower child flashing a peace sign and saying “Chill out, dude.”
To share or not to share? That’s the twenty-first-century Hamlet’s dilemma. With good reason: if you post those pictures of the weekend’s booze cruise, will a potential employer pass you over?
Here’s the answer: set the privacy on those pics to friends-only. More and more employers are scoping candidates on social media, so the image you present could affect your prospects.
There are many celebrated writers in this world, but few ever reach the rockstar-level status of dark fantasy author Neil Gaiman.
Fans stand in line for hours at his book signings, only to faint when they finally meet him (or ask him to sign their body so they can get his signature tattooed).
His beloved novels and comics—Coraline, Stardust, American Gods, Good Omens, and The Sandman (to name a few)—have gained cult followings and been adapted for the big screen and television.
If your work consists largely of moving words around on a screen, being understood is essential. At no time is this more evident than when workplace communications fail.
Say your team has been coordinating a crucial media announcement for weeks. You’ve gathered input from scientists and software developers at your company to clarify the details of your message, you’ve run the language past your boss and a company lawyer—you’ve even sat down with an executive to make sure your tone is on brand.
Though A Song of Ice and Fire was not written to be a writing guide, there are many valuable lessons in the epic that can be broadly applied to different facets of life.
Spoiler alert
In this post, we will be analyzing characters and their development throughout book five of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and season seven of HBO’s Game of Thrones to understand what lessons certain characters can offer to improve your writing.
First, second, and third person are ways of describing points of view.
When we talk about ourselves, our opinions, and the things that happen to us, we generally speak in the first person. The biggest clue that a sentence is written in the first person is the use of first-person pronouns.
There’s no silver bullet to get you the job you want, but power words might be the closest thing.
What are power words, you ask? Power words are buzzwords and special phrases that signal to a company that you’re on their wavelength. Use them to tailor your application to a specific company and show that you know their mission, their approach, and their values—and that you’ve done your homework.
Even rats have habits. MIT professor Ann Graybiel trained rats to run a T-shaped maze. First, Graybiel’s team rewarded the rats for turning right or left based on a tone. Even after the researchers stopped giving treats, they found that the rats still responded to the sounds as if by habit. The human brain forms habits too, so why not make them rewarding ones? Here are four reasons why proofreading should be a habit you pursue.
We all know that proofreading is important—it doesn’t matter if you’re a native speaker or just learning English. Nothing is worse than turning in a project you worked hard on, only to discover that it’s full of typos, misspellings, and grammatical mistakes. But proofreading your own writing is tough. Sometimes your brain sees what you meant to write instead of what’s actually on the page.
You work hard. You’d like to see your efforts rewarded. In an ideal world, your superiors would recognize your talent and offer you a promotion. But advancing is rarely that easy. We’ve compiled the ultimate guide to asking for a promotion. Read on if climbing the career ladder is in your sights!
Text speak gets a bad rap.
It’s been pegged as barbaric, accused of ruining the English language, identified as a symbol of the millennial generation’s laziness, and perhaps worst of all, it’s been strung up as the next bad habit liable to rot kids’ brains.
That puts it in the same category as American English, according to Prince Charles, and rock ’n’ roll, according to conservative evangelical parents of the 1950s—two institutions that turned out pretty okay, according to the majority.
Get out the pruning shears: a big part of good writing is good editing. And a surefire way to give your writing a confidence boost is to eliminate words that weigh down your writing and make you sound uncertain.
We call these weasel words. Like weasels, they’re not necessarily bad on their own. In fact, they’re kind of cute. But weasels are known for escaping situations (ever heard of someone “weaseling out” of something?).
When prepositional phrases are used in a parallel series, prepositions (with, to, of, over, under, by, etc.) should be repeated with every element of the series unless all elements use the same preposition. A common error is to repeat prepositions unnecessarily, resulting in a stilted style.
In this sentence, there are three prepositional phrases complementing I am making a stew.
You messed up on the job. Big time. Now what?
Making a mistake at work can be both horrifying and humbling. Not only does it leave you feeling embarrassed, but your professional reputation and credibility may hang in the balance. We don’t do our best thinking when we’re stressed or anxious, so knowing how to react before a mistake happens will prepare you to react sensibly.
When you picture someone meditating, what do you see? A yoga class? A person of South Asian descent in a religious context? A random businessperson in a stock photo?
Messages about mindfulness have been muddled, messy, and largely unhelpful since its rise to popularity. In the last few years, mindfulness has moved from hippie-and-yogi buzzword to bonified productivity skill lauded by the likes of The Harvard Business Review and Tim Ferriss.
In English, subject-verb agreement is important. What this means is that the characteristics of the subject should be reflected in the verb. For example, if a subject is a singular, the verb form must also be singular.
Likewise, if a subject is plural, the verb must also be plural.
There are many perks to speaking the lingua franca of your time, but one of the downsides is that you’ll always doubt whether you’re using it right. English has almost as many variants as there are countries that use it as their official language. A great example of that is the past tense of the verb learn—is it learnt? Or is it learned?
Learnt and learned are both used as the past participle and past tense of the verb to learn.
Workplace communication shouldn’t be this difficult.
Your team is mere days out from releasing the project you’ve all been agonizing over for weeks. There have been flurries of emails and messages, presentations, a legal review, and an afternoon of confusing discussions leading to charts drawn on whiteboards with markers that turned out not to be dry-erase. Oops.
Above all, there have been meetings—so many meetings.
You’re awesome. You know it. People close to you know it. But does your professional community know it?
When you think about it, your personal brand is already out there in the world. You’re reminded of that every time you Google yourself. (C’mon. You know you do it.) At a minimum, you’re likely to see your LinkedIn and Facebook profiles prominently featured. That’s a start.
An intensive pronoun is almost identical to a reflexive pronoun, but their functions differ. Intensive pronouns are used to add emphasis to the subject or antecedent of the sentence. You’ll usually find the intensive pronoun right after the noun or pronoun it’s modifying, but not necessarily.
The intensive/reflexive pronouns include myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves.
You landed an interview! It feels great knowing that a hiring manager from a company you’re interested in working for is also interested in you. But now the pressure’s on—you’ve got to rock the interview.
Here are some of the most common interview questions, and our advice for the best way to answer them.
This question is among the first that most interviewers ask, so it’s tempting to jump right in and start listing off all the qualities that make you the best person for the job.
Today, millions of online voices will cry out, “May the 4th be with you!” to celebrate Star Wars Day. When it comes to space, two franchises arguably rule the sci-fi universe—Star Wars and Star Trek. One struggles fiercely for independence in a galaxy far, far away while the other explores strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations. We wanted to see what things are unique about the way their fandoms communicate, so we took a broad look at the writing styles and accuracy of their Reddit fan communities by analyzing nearly 2,000 comments.
Emojis may be the cutting edge of language, but do any of us really know how to use them? For example, let’s say your friend sent you a text that read, “???☺️.” Would you know that it meant “the key to success is a great attitude”? Unless you and your friend have already established emoji conventions of your own, probably not. Emojis, while an interesting communicative device, don’t yet have a formal system of grammar governing their use.
If you’re leaving your job, you will need to tie up lots of loose ends. Leaving a positive impression on your colleagues is vital. How do you gracefully notify colleagues of your departure? Let’s talk about the perfect farewell message.
Sending farewell messages too early is a bad idea. People will inevitably stop by your office to wish you well face-to-face, and that could interfere with finishing up your last work tasks.
It’s that time of year… when you dread every interaction because you don’t know whether to say “Merry Christmas,” “Happy Holidays,” “Season’s Greetings,” or maybe some secret salutation you don’t even know yet. So what are you supposed to say?
In general, “Happy Holidays” is accepted as the broadest and most inclusive greeting at this time of year. If you know someone celebrates Christmas you can go with “Merry Christmas,” but ‘tis the season for interacting with strangers (selling to them, buying from them, bumping into them on your way out of Target).
In the hierarchy of things that drive grammar sticklers mad, to and too are near the top. It’s very common to see them confused, abused, and misused, and not just in YouTube comments or on Reddit.
Your LinkedIn profile is likely among the top—and thus most clicked—results if someone happens to Google you. And a well-curated LinkedIn summary can offer them a wealth of information about your professional background. So whether you’re just quietly cruising through options or firing off applications like it’s your other job, you want your profile to shine.
Maybe you’ve already done the obvious, making hundreds of connections and racking up tons of endorsements.
Since the early days of AOL (“You’ve got mail!”), I’ve spent countless hours in the email trenches working in jobs that ranged from customer service rep to online community manager to managing editor to PR representative. I’ve done the math, and even estimating at an ultra-conservative ten emails per day over twenty years, I’ve sent at least 73,000 emails. Those experiences, both good and bad, taught me what to do and what not to do.
A century ago, it was standard to write any time as two words in all contexts. But it’s now perfectly acceptable to write anytime as one word when you’re using it as an adverb. However, some readers still consider it a casualism, so you may want to stick to the two-word version for extremely formal writing.
Making a point in a clear, assertive email is one thing. But doing it in a text? LOL, way 2 much 4 txtspk.
Or is it?
Sure, you don’t have as much leeway in a text as in an email because of sheer lack of space, but it is possible to make a point, ask for something important, or express a serious idea in a text message. Here are some tips for how to make it so.
As in, “you,” “for,” “today,” “thanks.” Writing in real-speak instead of text-speak shows that you’re serious.
Being a good dad takes a lot of work, love, and sacrifice.
Being a great dad takes something a little extra . . .
. . . a certain humility
. . . and toughness with tenderness.
The best dads aspire to ultimate #dadgoals—like choreographing a routine to “Let It Go,” making Halloween costumes a priority, or being there when things get hard. This quiz mixes fun and honest questions to help you understand if you’ve unlocked the ultimate dad goals status.
Want to advance your career? Expanding your network can play a huge role in your success, but for many of us networking events can feel intimidating, panic-inducing, or just plain awkward.
So how do you set yourself apart from the job-seeking hordes, and still retain your dignity?
Whether you have no idea how to network or just want some pointers for upping your game, here are five simple ways you can stand out from the competition.
Happy Presidents’ Day! On this day when the United States honors their commander in chief, we thought it would be fun to look at the fictional portrayals of this office throughout pop culture history. We’ve found that many presidents from books, television, and film were excellent orators, and some may have surpassed even the most loquacious POTUS of their age. Here are some of our favorites, and we want to hear yours in the comments.
Though we might not think much about them in the context of all the issues discussed during elections, rhetoric and language play a critical role in the success of U.S. presidential candidates. The 2016 presidential election process has been particularly fascinating and prompted us to take a closer look at how election language has changed over time and how it influences candidate success.
Your alarm rings. You roll over, grab your phone, turn off the alarm, and immediately start scrolling through Instagram. Then you move to Facebook. Then Twitter. Then your work chat and email. Next thing you know, you have to rush through your morning routine and head to work.
Sound familiar?
If you’re wondering how to save time on social media, you’re not alone. Multiple studies have linked high social media use and negative feelings like dissatisfaction, disconnection, and even loneliness.
Irregular plural nouns are nouns that do not become plural by adding -s or -es, as most nouns in the English language do. You’re probably familiar with many of these already. For example, the plural form of man is men, not mans. The plural form of woman is women, not womans. There are hundreds of irregular plural nouns, and in truth, you must memorize them through reading and speaking.
The Oxford (or serial) comma is the final comma in a list of things. For example:
The Oxford comma comes right after eraser.
Use of the Oxford comma is stylistic, meaning that some style guides demand its use while others don’t. AP Style—the style guide that newspaper reporters adhere to—does not require the use of the Oxford comma.
Did you know that 33 percent of email recipients decide whether or not to open an email based on subject line alone? If you want your email read, you’ve got to get it opened first. Here are twenty powerful headers to try for four different types of email outreach, plus a few helpful tips for creating subject lines that work.
Met you at [event]. Let’s connect!
After a delightful meal, have you ever sent your compliments to the chef? Finishing a great novel can leave you with the same urge to congratulate the brilliant mind behind it. Did you know you can leave a message for your favorite author on Facebook? Besides messages, Facebook offers you the opportunity to discover a lot about your favorite writer. Let’s look at the pages of thirteen professional writers!
By Laura Wallis for The Stir by CafeMom
Words that sound alike but have different meanings and spellings are called homophones, and especially for kids who are just learning to spell, they can cause trouble every time. There are some rules to help budding writers remember the trickiest homophones, but in many cases it’s just a matter of memory. There, their . . . they’ll get them in time.
Hanukkah, if you didn’t already know, is a Jewish holiday that begins on the twenty-fifth of the Jewish month Kislev and lasts for eight days. It’s a winter holiday, and because Jewish months don’t correspond perfectly to the Gregorian calendar months, Hanukkah can fall in November, December, or even stretch into January. This year, it begins at sunset on December 24 and lasts until nightfall on January 1.
It is generally best to write out numbers from zero to one hundred in nontechnical writing. In scientific and technical writing, the prevailing style is to write out numbers under ten. While there are exceptions to these rules, your predominant concern should be expressing numbers consistently.
Numbers can disrupt readability in a paragraph, so for most writing purposes, it is best to flex those fingers and type out numbers less than 101 as fully spelled words.
A proper noun is a specific (i.e., not generic) name for a particular person, place, or thing. Proper nouns are always capitalized in English, no matter where they fall in a sentence. Because they endow nouns with a specific name, they are also sometimes called proper names.
Every noun can be classified as either common or proper. A common noun is the generic name for one item in a class or group.
Deciding whether to put a comma before or after but in a sentence is hard for a lot of writers, but it doesn’t have to be for you!
You should put a comma before but only when but is connecting two independent clauses.
How do you know you have two independent clauses? First, look at the words before but: I would go for a walk.
Whether you realize it or not, you’re a writer.
It’s hard not to be one in the information age, when writing is essential, if not inescapable. Maybe you’re keeping up with old friends and upcoming assignments. Or perhaps you’re trying to impress a hiring committee or a hot date. We’re constantly dashing off notes and status updates with a regularity that would’ve been the envy of anyone in the era of telegrams and typewriters, let alone the cloistered monks who hand-copied ancient scrolls by candlelight.
You could spend hours polishing your LinkedIn profile. As someone who has stared at several LinkedIn profiles to give recommendations, I know the hole you can fall into when you’re looking for a new job and need to “spruce up” your LinkedIn page.
Although you could take serious time to critically review, edit, and re-review each section of your profile, you probably shouldn’t.
So you’ve decided to write more. That’s your goal, your resolution.
You’re there; the keyboard is there. Maybe in your head you’re repeating “you can do it, you can do it,” getting pumped for the outpouring of productivity, the astronomical wordcount that will no doubt ensue at any moment now.
Yep, at any second, we’re going to kick into high gear and—Hang on, let’s put on some coffee first.
No one wants to be known as the king or queen of boring conversations. One way to prevent tedium is to avoid predictable speech patterns. Are you guilty of overusing “per our conversation?” Grab your listener’s attention with five fresh variations!
1 As Mentioned When you say “per our conversation,” your listeners understand that a conversation took place.
Everyone has a story to tell and a message to share. The challenge lies in getting that story and message out of your head and into print in a way that resonates with your audience.
Starting somewhere in the late 2000s, a certain type of personal essay experienced a popularity boom. These essays were ultra-personal and confessional in nature, often in a TMI sort of way.
Days, months, and holidays are always capitalized as these are proper nouns. Seasons aren’t generally capitalized unless they’re personified.
When I was a novice writer, I chafed at the idea of using an outline. I was certain organizing my thoughts in advance would stifle my creativity and make my writing stiff and uninspired. After all, how can serendipity happen if you’ve got everything planned?
But then I started creating content for a living, and I needed to turn out several polished articles every week.
Comedy lovers rejoice! After a six-year hiatus, Larry David’s acclaimed comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm is returning to HBO on October 1 for its much-anticipated ninth season.
Not familiar with the irascible Larry David? Larry got his start doing stand-up in the 1970s and was briefly a writer for SNL. But he’s best known as the true genius (and head writer and executive producer) behind the beloved ’90s sitcom Seinfeld, one of the most successful shows of all time.
We’ve all been there—mortified by the consequences of our own lack of care. Catching typos after you’ve hit send can limit your personal and professional opportunities at worst or be just plain annoying at best. You know that you should proofread but don’t because it requires an English degree (right?) and is time-consuming (right?). Actually, almost anyone can quickly and easily reduce (dare we say eliminate?) post-send mortifications by following these three proofreading tricks.
