The last thing you want to worry about when ringing in the new year is where to put the apostrophe. Get the nitty-gritty on New Year, New Year’s, and New Years so you can make a toast at midnight and get your punctuation right while you’re at it.
When is it “New Year’s”?
Use the apostrophe-S in “New Year’s” when you’re talking about December 31 or January 1 resolutions you’re making, or other things that “belong” to the New Year.
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.
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.
If only the people you emailed would answer every time. Unfortunately, many of your emails are destined to go unanswered. The average email user receives ninety-two emails per day (seventeen of which are likely to be spam) and opens only about one in three. If you want to make yourself heard in a noisy digital world, being able to write a compelling follow-up email is an essential skill.
At a glance, stationary and stationery look very much alike. But they couldn’t be further apart in meaning and function. So confusing them—and they’re often confused—is a noticeable mistake.
When something is fixed, immobile, or not subject to change, we can use the adjective stationary to describe it:
There are two types of relative clauses—defining and nondefining. To review, relative clauses can contain a subject, verb, and a relative pronoun, though not all are needed. The relative pronouns are who, whose, when, where, which, and that. Relative clauses are sometimes called adjective or adjectival clauses because they describe nouns like adjectives do. Defining clauses give essential information about the main noun.
Besides the question mark, how can you tell a question from a statement? One way is to look for sentence inversion. In statements, the subject usually comes before the verb. Questions invert the subject and the verb. In other words, the verb comes first, as in this example: Are you going to need a ride home from school? Sentence inversion isn’t a foolproof method for identifying a question, however.
Short stories often go underappreciated, but they represent an art form few authors truly master. For readers, the short story is the perfect literary snack, a choice morsel that fills a spare hour, refreshes the brain, and gives a moment of escape from daily routines. When you need something to nibble and lack the time for a novel, feast your eyes on these tiny tomes with outsized impact.
Imperative can be one of the following:
Imperative is one of those words that shouldn’t be thrown around unless there’s a very good reason for it.
With few exceptions, a comma should not separate a subject from its verb.
Writers are often tempted to insert a comma between a subject and verb this way because speakers sometimes pause at that point in a sentence. But in writing, the comma only makes the sentence seem stilted.
There is a well-known line, often attributed to Samuel Johnson, but preceded and followed by myriad others, that the pun is the lowest form of humor. If so, the limerick, a form of verse that depends on clever assonance and double entendre, is certainly the lowest form of poetry. In this post, we will shine a spotlight on the limerick, and see if the cockroaches scurry.
Word order in English is fixed for most speaking and writing.
In English, sentences start with a subject and are immediately followed by a verb. In questions, this order is switched.
To learn more about grammar and to help us celebrate National Grammar Day this March, visit our new resource page.
Case refers to the form a noun or pronoun takes depending on its function in a sentence. English pronouns have three cases: subjective, objective, and possessive.
The subjective (or nominative) pronouns are I, you (singular), he/she/it, we, you (plural), they and who. A subjective pronoun acts as a subject in a sentence. See the sentences below for illustration:
An object is the part of a sentence that gives meaning to the subject’s action of the verb. For example: Alice caught the baseball. Subject=Alice Verb=caught Object=baseball
A direct object answers the question of who(m) or what. In the sentence above, you could determine that ‘baseball’ is a direct object by asking the question: What did Alice catch? She caught the baseball.
