If you’ve seen the classic holiday movie, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, then you’ll probably remember this scene. Family man Clark Griswold stands at the lingerie counter of a large department store chatting up the pretty sales girl. After bumbling through the conversation and making a fool of himself, he smiles and says, “‘Tis the season to be merry!”
But where did ’tis the season, a phrase we use during the festive build-up to the end-of-year holidays, originate?
You’ve worked to make your email clear, and you’ve carefully edited to streamline your writing. The body of your email might well be perfect, but it can all go awry if you use the wrong sign-off. It’s just a word or a short phrase, followed by your signature, and yet finding the right tone to close your email often requires a surprising amount of thought and finesse.
“Synergistic.”
“Alignment.”
“Piggyback.”
“Engagement.”
“Low-hanging fruit.”
Business jargon seems to be taking over our offices. Aside from being cringe-worthy and borderline cliche, business jargon or “management speak” makes communication vague and unhelpful.
Additionally, this kind of “code language” can be extremely isolating to new people or people from other cultures, where business jargon is not widely used.
After you finish writing something, do you read it over? Hopefully yes, but reading is not proofreading. The process of reading for enjoyment or information is significantly different from the process of proofreading. How so? To proofread is to examine a document with the express purpose of finding and correcting errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Let’s compare and contrast reading and proofreading.
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.
Getting to know others in your office by striking up small talk conversations is an anxiety-inducing social activity, coming in right behind team-building exercises like the trust fall and that relay thing where you have to race around with a raw egg on a spoon. That goes double for introverted or shy people. This course will provide the student with five no-fail tips for striking up a conversation and sample scripts to demonstrate good small talk in action.
Is emigrate an alternative spelling of immigrate? If not, what’s the difference between immigrate and emigrate?
How many times have you seen “Happy Holidays from the Jones’s” or “Mary Christmas” in a Christmas card?
When you’re working through a stack of Christmas cards, it can be difficult to cross your t’s and dot your i’s, let alone remember a series of seemingly random holiday-related grammar rules. So, in the spirit of holiday giving, we’re giving you eight Christmas grammar tips for LitMas.
The pronoun everyone may be replaced by everybody. It is used to refer to all the people in a group. Written as two words, every one emphasizes each individual who makes up a group, and it means each person.
Unlike every time or everytime, everyone vs. every one is a decision that must be made with consideration to the meaning of the term in the context of your writing.
An essay is a brief composition on a specific topic. The most common essay types are analytical, argumentative, critical, expository, and narrative.
Students write essays. You knew that already. But do you know what kinds of essays students write? Here are the basics of how to write five different types of essays.
To analyze means to examine carefully or critically.
There, their, and they’re are the big trio of commonly confused words. All three of them are pronounced the same, and the spelling differences don’t seem to do a good job of stopping people from mixing them up.
Writing a résumé is not that different from writing a sales pitch: the writer is the product and the reader is the potential customer. The résumé has to grab the attention of the prospective employer. It needs to showcase why and how the applicant would be a valuable asset to the employer. In the best case scenario, a well-written résumé prompts the employer to pick up the phone and call the applicant immediately.
Your co-worker just sent you a message on Slack:
Bossy McBosserpants
I need the report as soon as possible
What runs through your head? Along with potential anxiety about a looming deadline (looks like you’re eating lunch at your desk again) you may feel annoyance. After all, that demand sounded pretty darn pushy.
via GIPHY
Requests that include “as soon as possible” (or the ubiquitous acronym ASAP) can come across as rude.
Welcome to Day Two of LitMas, the holiday for bookworms of all sorts! Yesterday, we gave you one short poem by Longfellow, and today we have another gift to share.
On the second day of LitMas, we’re paying homage to LitMas’s distant cousin, Christmas, with two stories you can read in less than an hour about this fascinating holiday. They’re both old enough to be classics, although neither of them gets as much attention as the “Night Before Christmas” and “Christmas Carol” set.
There’s only one way to write nowhere, somewhere, and anywhere, and that is as one word. If you write them as no where, some where, and any where, you’re making a mistake.
Our favorite authors create worlds, characters, and relationships that feel real to us. Here are four groups of siblings from literature we wish we were related to:
The March sisters in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March show us what true sisterhood is all about. They make up each other’s worlds, acting as playmates, enemies, counselors, and friends.
Any way you slice it, 2016 has been a tough year.
We lost beloved novelists like Harper Lee and Gloria Naylor; lyricists like David Bowie, Prince, and Leonard Cohen; and book-character-embodying actors like Alan Rickman and Gene Wilder.
We expressed a dip in mood in our writing online. One study by social media analytics company Crimson Hexagon showed that popular retail holidays like Black Friday experienced a rise in negative sentiment in 2016, despite rosy predictions.
When while is used as a conjunction, it has two meanings. One meaning is related to time. In the temporal sense, while describes something that is happening at the same time as something else. The other meaning of while indicates a contrast.
Sometimes, when you forget to use an apostrophe, you get a word that’s just a misspelling of the original. But with won’t and wont, you get a word with its own completely unrelated meaning.
When we say won’t, we are actually saying will not.
