When humans aggregate into groups, we tend to develop new lexicons specific to our group context. Wizards complain about “muggles,” high schoolers aspire to “squad goals”—and occasionally a mid-level manager stares fervently into your eyes and tells you it’s time to “shift the paradigm.”
In recent years business jargon has somehow evolved into a tangled mess of annoying, pretentious, tired clichés that are more effective at obscuring than clarifying meaning.
Like an unkeyboardinated tween, you can count on language for boundless creativity – and a seeming randomness that’s hard to keep up with.
We’re constantly adding new words and devising new forms and quirky mashups of old ones. But whether you’re squishing two existing words together to create a new one, or perhaps repurposing a familiar pronoun to be more inclusive, many of the ways we tinker with language follow a few well-worn patterns.
Can’t? Cannot? Can not? Find out the right way to use all three.
Can’t is a contraction of cannot, and as such it’s sometimes unsuitable for formal writing. In everyday writing and in speaking, it’s ubiquitous:
Cannot is better for formal writing:
Various educators teach rules governing the length of paragraphs. They may say that a paragraph should be 100 to 200 words long, or be no more than five or six sentences. But a good paragraph should not be measured in characters, words, or sentences. The true measure of your paragraphs should be ideas.
Your childhood teacher did not wrong you when he or she taught you that there should be three, or four, or five sentences in a paragraph.
We’re not going to advise you to just “deal with it” when a coworker talks too much, listens to music too loudly, wears too much perfume, doesn’t meet deadlines, or does just about any other irritating thing people do at work.
This is about understanding your personal tolerance level at work and clearly communicating it to those around you without burning bridges.
In today’s competitive job market, how you communicate with potential employers can make your skills stand out. Making sure you effectively express yourself, accurately represent your abilities, and stay present throughout the process is what makes the difference in ultimately receiving a job offer.
Your first interaction with your desired company is likely to happen through writing.
Verb tenses are forms of verbs that show whether we are talking about the past, present, or future. There are six classical tenses in English and an additional six tenses that are categorized as “perfect tenses.”
The classical tenses, using the verb “walk” as an example, are: Present simple (I walk) Present continuous ( I am walking)
Simple past (I walked) Past continuous (I was walking)
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.
First and firstly are both ordinal (or ordering) adverbs that English speakers and writers use to enumerate related points (e.g., first…second…third… or firstly…secondly…thirdly…). Because first, second, and third work perfectly well as both adjectives and adverbs, some people find that adding -ly is superfluous and even a little bit pretentious. In other words, it is grammatical overkill.
Leaving for vacation? Heading to a work conference? Beset with the flu? You’re taking a break from email correspondence, which means it’s time to set up the dreaded “out of office” message. Not only is it a bore to write, most people will be less than delighted to read it when they were expecting a real response from you.
But what if you could turn this necessary evil into a way of engaging with people that’s informative, memorable, and even fun?
Could the things you’re saying during job interviews be costing you offers? Knowing the right things to say requires practice and a little finesse. But accidentally saying the wrong thing is all too easy to do. Interviews are stressful, and it can be challenging to keep a cool head when your palms are sweating and your heart is beating double-time.
Taking the time to prepare can mean the difference between walking away from an interview with a sinking feeling and landing the sweet gig you’ve been hoping for.
If you speak and write English, it’s most common to use an S or ES ending to make a noun plural. However, some words that derive from Latin have retained their Latin plural endings. Let’s talk about some of the most useful of these words. Certain words English has borrowed from Latin retain Latin endings in their plural forms: alga (algae), larva (larvae), and nucleus (nuclei).
You made it. You’re a manager or boss, maybe even a business owner or CEO. Now, it’s time to be a leader. If you know anything about managing other people and their ideas, you know that it’s a super tough gig. There are many tempting traps you can fall into when it comes to being in charge, but as long as you’re cognizant of them, they’re possible to avoid. Keep reading for our top ten mistakes leaders make, plus how to be sure you steer clear of them.
40 (forty) is the number that follows 39 and precedes 41. Though it’s related to the number “four” (4), the modern spelling of 40 is “forty.” The older form, “fourty,” is treated as a misspelling today. The modern spelling could reflect a historical pronunciation change.
If you catch yourself misspelling the name of this number as fourty, you’re not alone. It’s a common mistake, both in print and online:
No matter what type of writing you do, it can be easy to miss your own mistakes in the editing process. Since you wrote the words, you often read what you intended to write (and not what is actually written). You can’t see any flaws in your writing because you’re just too close to it.
Use these five tips to edit your own work more effectively — and to improve your writing.
If you need to emphasize a word or a particular fact in a sentence, you can use italics to stress it. That said, italics and other font changes lose their impact if overused. It is best to use such devices sparingly and rely on strong writing and strategic word placement to get your point across.
Before the advent of word processing, it was common to underline words to show emphasis.
As you read these words, your brain is decoding a series of abstract symbols and synthesizing the results into complex ideas. It’s an amazing process. The English writer Katie Oldham described the “surreal” act of reading a book this way: “You stare at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly.”
And as if it weren’t already strange enough, consider this: If you do enough of it—that is, read a lot—it may not only rewire parts of your brain, but perhaps even make you a nicer person. (Maybe.
This morning, my guy texted me:
And I texted back:
He said, “Good morning! It’s a beautiful day. Love you!”
And I wrote back, “Good morning! I’ve got a song in my heart. Mwah! Love you, too.”
The texter and I are close. We know each other, so our emoji-only conversation made sense to us. The message is unambiguous enough that even an outside observer might have interpreted it similarly.
Homophones sound the same but are spelled differently. People often confuse homophone pairs, and bare and bear are no exception. Which phrase is correct—bear with me or bare with me?
Besides being the name of a big furry animal, bear functions as a verb. It means to tolerate, to carry something, or to endure.
