On the morning of September 14, 1814, the sun rose to reveal a surprising sight to Francis Scott Key.
Just a month after the British had burned the White House during the height of the War of 1812, Key was aboard a British vessel negotiating the release of a friend who was being held prisoner. During Key’s time aboard the vessel, the British commenced an attack on Fort McHenry and the pair was not allowed to leave.
Few punctuation marks have as exciting a name as the interrobang. But what does the interrobang do?
The interrobang combines the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!) into a single punctuation mark. It conveys a question asked in an excited way. For example:
How many different rules of grammar and punctuation exist? For every rule, there exists a person eager to publicly expose any rulebreakers. These vigilante defenders of grammatical order are grammar trolls. Here are thirteen types to watch out for.
In the world of writing, a red herring doesn’t refer to a fish. Instead, it’s misleading or distracting information.
Besides being cool, dinosaurs are funny. Chuckling about these amusing extinct animals will help you cope with life. Check out these roaring dinosaur puns!
Answer: A thesaurus.
No list of dinosaur puns would be complete without this one. It is one of the oldest jokes in the book!
“How will I need this in the real world?” high school students often ask. Everyone knows that journalists and authors write for a living. But are effective writing skills necessary for other careers? You will be surprised; some professions use writing more than you think!
Writing can influence people to try a new product or remain loyal to a brand.
Ah, motivation. Sometimes you can feel it coursing through your veins, and sometimes it seems as fleeting as snow in the spring. When you feel completely out of motivation, burned out, or exhausted, what do you do?
So far in our Monday Motivation Hack series, we’ve covered things that help you when you’re highly motivated, like to-do lists, morning routines, and mindfulness.
You think you’re locking in your career by never missing a day.
You’re not alone.
Research shows that more than a quarter of workers fear that taking time off will make them seem less dedicated. Others think that vacation-time martyrdom will boost their chances for a raise or a promotion (it doesn’t).
But, this (very American) cultural phenomenon of rarely taking time off and almost never using all of one’s vacation days is bad news for employers and employees alike.
Stats. They are everywhere. They are in your sports, your weather forecast, and now they are being used by Grammarly, too. Unlike that statistics class you took that one time, Grammarly Insights are designed to provide you with useful information about how you write.
Some of you may have noticed that we started sending you a weekly progress report via email each Monday.
Some like it hot. Others like it cold, or cluttered, or colorful. As you can imagine, authors, poets, and playwrights find inspiration in a variety of writing environments. With Log Cabin Day coming up on June 28, the Grammarly team began thinking about the best — and most interesting — places to write.
Are you curious about where your favorite author penned his or her bestseller?
Reading is often a solitary experience. But good books can bring people together in surprising and meaningful ways. Here are three books we think would be great to read with a close friend, or someone with whom you might want to become close friends:
The friendship between Diana Barry and Anne Shirley in the Anne of Green Gables series is famous for providing us with the term “bosom friend.” Anne and Diana are friends through thick and thin, stirring up mischief and helping each other through life’s struggles in equal measure.
The terms former and latter are words used to distinguish between two things. Former directs us to the first of these two things, and latter directs us to the second (or last) of them. Do not use former or latter when you are writing about more than two things.
Former and latter are words that sound old-fashioned to some people, and indeed they are very old words.
According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, former derives from the Old English word forma, meaning “first.” By the 12th century, former was used to mean “first, earliest in time or order,” and by the 1580s, it arrived at its present meaning, “the first of two.”Latter has a similar history.
Isn’t English grand?
Even if English has been called “a bastard tongue” by many, I still love it. Complex, creole, and occasionally confusing, English is a language that has borrowed and stolen some of the best elements of other languages to make something all its own. Who couldn’t love the language that gave us hilarious-sounding words like “wabbit” and “nagware”?
And with 1.5 billion active speakers, it’s also one of the most widely adopted languages in history.
When writing a date, a comma is used to separate the day from the month, and the date from the year.
But if you’re writing the date in day-month-year format, you don’t need a comma.
Do use a comma if you’re including a day of the week with the date.
You’re sitting at your desk, staring at a flashing cursor and waiting for the words to flow. Every now and then, you write something, then mercilessly edit it or delete it all together.
Backspace . . . backspace . . . backspace . . .
You roll your head back and forth to work the kinks out of your neck and sigh. The words just won’t flow. You’re convinced you’ve got a serious case of writer’s block.
Yesterday, Selection Sunday marked the start of the frenetic sports season many like to call March Madness. Today, we’re launching a bracket like the one you may have filled out yesterday, but our March MADness tournament contains only the most infuriating, enraging work communication pet peeves. These annoying office habits keep you from understanding—or, sometimes, liking—your coworkers, and we’re trying to find the worst habit you can form at work.
Just a page. Just a paragraph. Just a word.
When you have a case of writer’s block, you’d take anything, any progress to get the creative juices flowing again. But it can seem like the well’s run dry.
Overcoming a creative block is a process. Sometimes the fog suddenly lifts, but more likely you will have to work until the sun shines again. It will take some willpower.
Adjectives are words that modify nouns. They are often called “describing words” because they give us further details about a noun, such as what it looks like (the white horse), how many there are (the three boys) or which one it is (the last house). Adjectives do not modify verbs or other adjectives.
Most often, adjectives are easy to identify in a sentence because they fall right before the nouns they modify.
Imagine you’re hard at work on a report that’s due by the end of the day. It’s been a busy week so far, and you’ve got a long way to go, so you need to avoid distractions. Unfortunately, your eyes are watering and your nose is twitching because the guy in the next cube, the one who bikes ten miles to work every day, is . . . aromatic. And not in a pleasant way.
It’s time to either fill your cube to the brim with potpourri or confront Joe Cyclist.
What is the purpose of an interview? Companies conduct them because they want to know about your experience, education, and character. Different interviewers ask different questions, but their underlying query is the same: Who are you? To answer that question effectively and sell your skills, you can use a special tool called an elevator pitch or elevator speech. You are about to learn what a good and bad elevator speech looks like, and how you can write an outstanding one.
