When deciding whether to use is or are, look at whether the noun is plural or singular. If the noun is singular, use is. If it is plural or there is more than one noun, use are.
April 27 is Tell a Story Day, a great time for writers at all levels to finally share the stories that they’ve been keeping to themselves. But, what if the story you want to tell isn’t quite ready for its debut?
We encourage you to find a different story to tell! How, you ask? Read on . . .
Famous writers approached their writing in different ways, but one commonality involved extracting stories from real life experiences.
May 5 is National Teacher Day. In advance of the holiday, it’s important to remember that you wouldn’t be where you are today without the teachers who influenced you throughout your life. Whether your favorite educators are from elementary school, high school, or college, make sure to tell them what a positive effect they’ve had on your life. Here are six ways to celebrate National Teacher Day.
Is anymore one word or two? It depends on how you’re using it. We’re here to set the record straight.
Any more and anymore have related meanings, but they’re not interchangeable. Whether you make anymore one word or two depends on how you’re using it. Any more refers to quantities (Would you like any more tea?). Anymore is an adverb that refers to time (I don’t like tea anymore.).
People use both further and farther to mean “more distant.” However, American English speakers favor farther for physical distances and further for figurative distances.
Ray LeBlond once said “You learn something every day if you pay attention.” Today is the day to learn the difference between further and farther.
Unsurprisingly, farther means “at or to a greater distance.” In Salt to the Sea, Ruta Sepetys uses this adverb to describe the activity of some sea vessels: Some boats eventually floated ashore.
Romeo and Juliet, peanut butter and jelly. . . some combinations just seem to go together. Deadlines and exhaustion, on the other hand, are a pair that no one likes to experience. What do you do when you are confronted with that undesirable duo? Put up a fight with these seven motivating tactics.
If someone told you to do an online search for a blueprint for a house, you would skip off to your computer without a care in the world.
We already touched on the difference between between and among when we talked about the difference between among and amongst. But let’s take a closer look at these two commonly confused words. We might even dispel a grammar myth in the process.
Breaking news! Read all about it—The Associated Press, one of the most widely followed authorities on written style, has lowercased the word “internet” in their 2016 style guide.
Starting today, AP uses lowercase internet and web in all instances. #APStyleChat
The decision has sparked much debate in the editorial and technology industries and beyond, but this isn’t the first time that an AP Stylebook change has caused some ripples . . .
Written communication isn’t easy. If it was, there would be no misunderstandings on social media, and we would never have to go back and clarify something we’d written after the fact. But that’s not the world we live in.
The need to improve one’s writing skills isn’t reserved only for those who want to be published novelists or award-winning journalists—there are endless benefits to being able to communicate through the written word.
Do not check your email! Plenty of people with fancy credentials will tell you to avoid your email at all costs in the morning. Time management consultant Julie Morgenstern wrote a whole book about it. She told The Huffington Post that if you give in to the temptation, “you will never recover.” Personal development writer Sid Savara gives seven reasons not to check it.
A personal pronoun is a short word we use as a simple substitute for the proper name of a person. Each of the English personal pronouns shows us the grammatical person, gender, number, and case of the noun it replaces. I, you, he, she, it, we they, me, him, her, us, and them are all personal pronouns.
Personal pronouns are the stunt doubles of grammar; they stand in for the people (and perhaps animals) who star in our sentences.
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.
It’s often said that the whole isn’t necessarily the sum of its parts. That maxim applies when you turn “every day” into “everyday,” and it’s the same when you turn all together into altogether—you get something completely different.
A house needs a good foundation. Likewise, to speak a language, you need a firm understanding of grammar. Here are some basic rules you will need to know if you want to speak and write English well.
Nouns denote animate and inanimate things, ideas, places, or people. They compose about half of the English language. There are many types of nouns, and each type has its own usage rules.
How many emails do you send per day? With over 200 billion emails going out every single day, there’s a good chance at least a couple of them are coming from you. But if you’re not structuring your emails properly, you may be making both your and your recipient’s lives more difficult than they need to be.
Whether you’re asking for customer support, planning a party, or sending a work email, the following tips will help you craft efficient and effective emails that actually get things done.
via GIPHY
On the heels of our breakdown of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s writing habits, we’re serving up more writing wisdom from none other than the fabulous Tina Fey! The award-winning comedian-screenwriter-actress-producer-author has spent the past twenty years blazing trails as one of the great comic geniuses of our time.
And just in case you’ve been hiking the Amazon or watching only C-SPAN for the past twenty years, here’s a quick recap of her career . . .
A prepositional phrase is a group of words consisting of a preposition, its object, and any words that modify the object. Most of the time, a prepositional phrase modifies a verb or a noun. These two kinds of prepositional phrases are called adverbial phrases and adjectival phrases, respectively.
At a minimum, a prepositional phrase consists of one preposition and the object it governs.
Many of us learned in school that adjectives modify nouns and that adverbs modify verbs. But as we’ve seen, adjectives can also act as complements for linking verbs. This leads to a common type of error: incorrectly substituting an adverb in place of a predicate adjective. An example you’ve probably heard before is:
Because “feel” is a verb, it seems to call for an adverb rather than an adjective.
Every November, wordsmiths around the globe take on the ultimate writing challenge—to crank out a 50,000-word novel in just thirty days. The event is called NaNoWriMo (an acronym for National Novel Writing Month), and last year it drew 431,626 participants. Although the format is meant to encourage quick, seat-of-your-pants writing, the words writers churn out during the annual event aren’t necessarily for naught.
