Guest post by Matt Banner
Today’s digital age has brought back the craft of writing, but at a cost. With the rising popularity of hashtags, tweets, emoticons, and shorthand phrases like the ever-present “LOL,” it seems like good grammar has gone out the window. At the end of the day, does grammar still matter in this digital age?
For the foreseeable future, the answer is yes.
You’re having an average morning at the office, when suddenly word ripples out from the corner suite: the boss is going to visit a major potential client this afternoon, and she wants the latest version of the demo ready to show off. A wave of adrenaline sweeps the room—this is all hands on deck.
The copywriter and designers launch into vetting every scrap of text and making sure every element on the screen will be pixel-perfect.
Do you know the answer? Read on to find out which one is correct!
There are many (perhaps countless) homophones in the English language. These are words and phrases that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings. Here are three commonly confused homophones worth knowing:
1. A while vs. awhile A while refers to a period of time. In this construction, ‘while’ acts as a noun.
The great English writer Charles Dickens is known for his well-crafted characters. While some of the characters we meet in Dickens’ novels are endearing heroes, others are sinister villains. Here are three Dickens characters you would never want to meet.
Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist A career criminal, violent abuser, and murderer, Bill Sikes is at the top of the list of characters to avoid.
Do you love being able to walk into your local bookstore and actually pick up a book and look through its pages?
The boom in e-reader and tablet sales are creating stiff competition for brick and mortar bookstores. Just as the corporate chains threatened to gobble up the independent competition in the pre-tablet, today’s digital media giants threaten brick and mortar merchants.
What do you say when you make a mistake? If you use sorry often, the expression may lose a little of its power. Here are six other words for saying sorry.
My apologies is another word for “I’m sorry.” It’s rather formal, so it’s fine for business contexts. Commonly, people use it to decline an invitation or express regret at not being able to fulfill a request.
What is #GrammoWriMo?
In November 2013, in honor of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), Grammarly has organized the largest group of authors to collaborate on a single novel—we’re calling the project #GrammoWriMo.
How many people are participating?
More than 750 people have signed up to participate in #GrammoWriMo. We’ve divided the novel into 30 chapters—between 25 and 26 writers have been assigned to contribute to each chapter.
Recently, the Grammarly community grew to over 7 million language-loving friends — more than 5 million can be found on Facebook. We have enjoyed sharing our love of language and writing with the world. In honor of the growth of such a passionate and fun community, we surveyed our fans to find out more about what makes a grammar nerd!
Here’s what we found:
What kind of grammar lover are you?
I would like to be remembered as someone who was not afraid to do what she wanted to do, and as someone who took risks along the way in order to achieve her goals.
Did you know May 26 is Sally Ride day?
Sally Ride was an astronaut, physicist, and science educator—and she shattered one of the highest glass ceilings to become the first American woman in space.
Welcome to one of our favorite holidays of the year: Bad Poetry Day. August 18 brings with it the license and the freedom to let those terrible sonnets fly.
Sure, many of us remember our high school days when just about any drama would send us scurrying to the page to dash off a few lines. However, the resulting text is not exactly what we mean by bad poetry. Even those stanzas, penned when we were young, were important to us.
How do you know when to use Dear Sir or Madam or something else? When writing a business letter or email, it can be a real challenge to get the salutation right—especially for someone you don’t know or an organization you’ve never worked with. In such situations, you should err on the side of formality, but even then there are good reasons to avoid Dear Sir or Madam.
Any writer who’s spent time in the trenches publishing articles online knows it’s hard to keep a reader’s attention. In fact, according to Tony Haile’s 2014 article on Time.com, 55 percent of readers will spend fifteen seconds or less actively on a page reading the article that took you many times longer to write and carefully proofread. Like it or not, our online culture, which blasts us with a never-ending stream of content 24/7, has made us skimmers rather than deep readers.
If you’re trying to market your brand or sell a product, a grammatical mistake or typo can hold you back from success. Find out how it can hinder you (with funny pictures for proof), why it matters, and what you can do to ensure clean copy.
A few spelling and grammatical errors won’t necessarily prevent people from buying your product.
Some stores compile lists of products you can buy from them. These lists (often in book form) are sometimes accompanied by descriptions and photos of the products. You may see this book described as either a catalog or a catalogue.
Everybody loves a compliment. Or is it a complement they love? If there is a published list of commonly confused words, complement and compliment are almost certain to appear. However, these two terms don’t have to be on your personal list of befuddling vocabulary!
From Merriam-Webster’s Peter Sokolowski, here’s the full list of words
(we added a few notations about why certain words were added, via the m-w.com press release):
aha moment n (1939) : a moment of sudden realization, inspiration, insight, recognition, or comprehension [Oprah Winfrey’s signature phrase]
brain cramp n (1982) : an instance of temporary mental confusion resulting in an error or lapse of judgment
Many folks’ grammar abilities take a nosedive when it comes to this verb. After this article, that will all be in the past. But does that mean your grammar abilities nosedived, or nosedove?
Dive on in to get the details on the difference between dived and dove.
To dive is an verb meaning: To swim under water To jump into water head-first To descend sharply or steeply Or, figuratively: To undertake with enthusiasm, or to plunge into a subject, question, business, etc.
A common noun is the generic name for a person, place, or thing in a class or group. Unlike proper nouns, a common noun is not capitalized unless it either begins a sentence or appears in a title. Common nouns can be concrete (perceptible to the senses), abstract (involving general ideas or qualities), or collective (referring to a group or collection).
All nouns can be classified as either common or proper.
There’s a harsh reality we need to face—a robotic, AI-driven Shakespeare is nowhere in sight. No robot will write verse that influences English the way Bard’s did anytime soon. You won’t find an AI spitting rhymes like Rakim or Nas, either.
But if your standards aren’t too high, there is some AI-constructed poetry you can read today. Take an AI that uses the recurrent neural network language model technique, feed it thousands of romantic novels to learn language from, give it a starting sentence and an ending sentence, instruct it to fill the gap between them, and you’ll get something like this:
