Writing is like falling in love. Those who really succeed at the endeavor are those who are willing to put their hearts out there and risk being rejected. As you can imagine, this can be a wonderful experience–or it can be agonizing. At least for adults.
For children, falling in love with writing is less dramatic. It’s about learning to tell their stories and committing to paper all of the make-believe worlds they have created.
Mondays induce negativity like no other day. After all, weekends are straight-up awesome. If we’re lucky, we get to sleep in, enjoy a breakfast that’s not rushed, and maybe savor a cup of coffee while laughing at YouTube videos of dogs failing at being dogs. Sometimes, we have exciting activities planned. Sometimes we get to enjoy leisure time. And sure, sometimes we work.
There are four elements of the zodiac—air, fire, water, and earth. The zodiac signs within each element share characteristics. Take this fun quiz to find out which zodiac element your writing style is like and see if it matches your real zodiac sign!
Did we get it right? Share your thoughts in the comments.
With the revelation of Melania Trump’s alleged plagiarism of a 2008 Michelle Obama speech, plagiarism is suddenly front-page news. Although this may be the most talked-about instance of plagiarism at the moment, it’s far from the first. Plagiarism has existed as long as intellectual property has, and there have been numerous public figures accused of this academic transgression, including the United States’ current president and vice president.
People read for a variety of reasons: entertainment, knowledge, understanding. There’s no better way to gain a larger vocabulary than by reading novels of all types and genres. Your high school teachers might have considered the classics the only true literature with educational value, but there are plenty of modern tales that can help you pick up new words to fling around at cocktail parties.
A collective noun is a word or phrase that refers to a group of people or things as one entity. One common error that arises from using collective nouns is subject-verb disagreement: writers often become confused about whether to treat a collective noun as singular or plural. While collective nouns are mostly treated as singular, there are exceptions.
Collective nouns represent more than one person or thing in a class.
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.
Sentences may contain many different types of clauses. Defining clauses, also called restrictive clauses, serve an important function. What role do they play in sentences and how does it relate to the name of these clauses?
First, let’s lay some groundwork. A subject, verb, and a relative pronoun (who, whose, where, when, which, or that) distinguish relative clauses from other types of clauses, though not all three are needed.
If you find yourself debating whether to use “was” or “were” in a sentence, it’s likely that you’re dealing with an unreal conditional sentence. As a refresher, an unreal conditional sentence expresses events that are hypothetical or improbable.
Typically, an unreal conditional sentence begins with an if clause containing the past tense or past perfect tense of a verb followed by a conditional clause containing a modal verb such as “would.” Consider the following sentences:
When spoken aloud, would of and its fellows should of and could of sound exactly like would’ve, could’ve and should’ve. But even if no one can tell the difference when you’re speaking, the mistake becomes obvious as soon as you write it down.
When people write would of, should of, could of, will of or might of, they are usually confusing the verb have with the preposition of.
“It’s not how much we give,” said Mother Teresa, “but how much love we put into giving.” This statement is liberating and beautiful, but it sets a high standard on Mother’s Day. Buying Mom a blouse at the mall might be convenient, but creating a heartfelt gift with your own hands means more.
Mother’s Day is May 10. Check out these five creative ways to help Mom understand just what she means on her special day.
In honor of National Poetry Month, writer Antonella Gazzardi has contributed a poem about grammar for your reading pleasure!
Every weekday in April, we will be sharing a poem, an excerpt of poetry, or a feature on a poet. Our celebration will feature poetry from every era, and we ask our friends to join us throughout the month by sharing their favorite poetry under the tag #PoetryMonth.
A young man named John Koenig was trying to write poems. However, some emotions seemed difficult to express in words. He had the idea of creating words for these previously unnamed feelings in a dictionary. Thus, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows was born. He began a website and a web series on Youtube that introduced his words to the world. Now, people everywhere can contribute to the dictionary.
In the murky territory of words you’ve heard people use but you’re not really sure whether you could call them words, ginormous takes up a lot of space.
Ginormous originated during the World War II as a slang word among British soldiers. Its first official appearance in written form was in the 1948 A Dictionary of Forces’ Slang, 1939-1945.
I know it’s dirty and unconventional, but I liked to do it outside in college.
The first time was spring semester of my freshman year, and once I started I just couldn’t stop. Because I went school in Wisconsin, the passing of the seasons limited when I could indulge in the grassy common areas around campus — but when the weather was right I’d do it outdoors for hours. As a young, open-minded philosophy student, it didn’t take much to turn me on — to writing.
Whether it’s a to-do list that never seems to get done, a less-than-inspired morning routine, or a tendency to get distracted (damn you, social media!), we’ve all got a hole in our productivity armor somewhere. Every Monday, we’re going to be analyzing common bad habits that could be holding you back, and we’ll offer a hack or two to help you get more quality output from your time.
Every grammarian has a list of grammar pet peeves. We compile new lists every year. However, some errors are insidiously persistent. Like coffee stains on a snow-white rug, we cannot seem to scrub them away no matter how hard we try. But we must keep up the fight.
Join us as we again leap into the fray against our arch-nemesis: the most-common-glaring-grammar-errors-of-all-time.
Grammar is important, but it’s not a matter of life or death. Or is it? How does grammar influence the legal system? Researchers decided to find out by conducting an experiment. Does the wording of the description of a murder affect whether jurors classify a crime as first- or second-degree murder? According to their findings, “legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but [most significantly] limited to temporal dynamics… In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context.” In other words, grammar plays a part, but the study participants also paid attention to context when making their decisions.
There are two types of writers in this world: those who use too many commas and those who use too few. While unnecessary commas can turn straightforward sentences into twisting labyrinths of syntactical confusion, missing a critical comma can change the entire meaning of your sentence.
Consider the headline from the now-infamous Rachael Ray cover of Tails magazine: “Rachael Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.” While the line breaks of the original cover make it apparent what the editors meant to say, the lack of commas between the three items in the list—“cooking,” “family,” and “her dog”—caused Tails to accidentally portray Ray as a cannibal who gleefully cooks her family and dog.
