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.
Do you enjoy team sports? Some team positions carry special responsibilities. In hockey, the goalie’s job is to block the other team from scoring. In American football, the place holder steadies the football for the field goal kicker. If you imagine language as a team sport, you can think of grammatical cases as team positions. They tell you the special roles of pronouns.
Whilst and while are two words with identical meanings—usually. But you can’t always use whilst instead of while.
Typically, Brits use whilst and Americans use while. That’s the main difference. When used as a conjunction or an adverb, while and whilst are interchangeable:
The present perfect continuous tense (also known as the present perfect progressive tense) shows that something started in the past and is continuing at the present time. The present perfect continuous is formed using the construction has/have been + the present participle (root + -ing).
In this sentence, using the present perfect continuous verb tense conveys that reading War and Peace is an activity that began sometime in the past and is not yet finished in the present (which is understandable in this case, given the length of Tolstoy’s weighty tome).
Welcome back to the Not-So-Sweet 16! Today, we have two powerhouse email competitors that vie for the enviable title of “most annoying email habit.” Which do you think is worse, sneaky CCs or mass forwards?
Boss CC Sneak Attack:
Occasionally, there is a reason to CC your manager on an email about a project or issue you’re working on. This is not one of those times. The “sneak attack” occurs when someone adds your boss to a thread in order to intimidate you or encourage a specific outcome.
Pronouns need antecedents. That means that the thing (or person, or place) that the pronoun refers to needs to have been mentioned already by name somewhere earlier in the sentence or paragraph. If it’s not clear which thing the pronoun refers to, the reader can get quite confused.
Learn more about pronoun-antecedent agreement.
To learn more about grammar and to help us celebrate National Grammar Day this March, visit our new resource page.
In most cases, the subjunctive form of a verb is usually the third-person form of the verb with the ‑s dropped, but the verb to be is a special case. The subjunctive is used after certain expressions that contain an order or a request, a hypothetical, or a wish.
Here’s an example of the subjunctive mood in action:
Tell a writer that he should avoid the passive voice in writing, and he’ll usually agree – although the passive voice is perfectly acceptable grammatically.
Most writers know that the sentence, “The cow jumped over the moon” is better than “The moon was jumped over by the cow.” However, if you check a few documents with Grammarly’s Add-in for Microsoft Office Suite, you’ll see that this ghost continues to haunt.
According to an oft-quoted 2002 article from The New York Times, 81 percent of Americans believe they have a book in them – and that they should write it.
In November, 41,940 participants in National Novel Writing Month did just that when they successfully wrote 50,000 words in 30 days. At the same time, because not all novelists-to-be have the time to write a solo-book, the Grammarly team organized a group of authors to collaborate on one novel.
Offense is spelled differently based on where you, or your audience, are. But neither offense nor offence are wrong.
In one sense, offense means an attack.
Isn’t the imagination a wonderful thing? In English, the subjunctive mood expresses hypothetical and conditional expressions. Let’s explore.
Most of the time, the subjunctive mood of a verb looks exactly like the indicative form. The only way to know the difference between the two is by the context of the sentence. However, you can recognize third person singular verbs in the subjunctive mood because there is no S on the end of the them.
Some of the greatest works of literature contain beautifully written declarations of love. But if you want to learn the rules of grammar, don’t look to these novels for help. Here are some of the most romantic quotes from literature and explanations of the grammar rules they bend and break.
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘To-night’ is possibly confused with the correctly spelled word, ‘tonight.’ In the past, this hyphenated spelling of ‘tonight’ was common, but it’s best to use the modern spelling in your writing to keep the meaning clear.
To hear some people tell it, one of the great hallmarks of the holiday season is singing carols–think Jingle Bell Rock, Silent Night, and Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. But interestingly, many carolers don’t actually stop to consider the words of these popular holiday songs.
Commonly misunderstood song lyrics can be hilarious or downright confusing–so as word nerds, the Grammarly team decided to take a closer look.
A day for fools? People around the world, and especially in North America and Europe, celebrate April 1 by playing practical jokes and trying to convince each other of outlandish false stories. But how did these customs evolve and why on the first day of April?
To answer that, we have to journey back in time to the reign of Constantine, a Roman emperor in the fourth century.
meaning against (especially in sports and legal use); as opposed to, in contrast to. (Often abbreviated as vs.) For example:
meaning a kind of writing arranged with a metrical rhythm, typically having a rhyme; small sections of the Jewish or Christian Bible; several similar units of a song.
The past perfect, also called the pluperfect, is a verb tense used to talk about actions that were completed before some point in the past.
The past perfect tense is for talking about something that happened before something else.
Have you ever memorized the chorus of a song? You may sing a few lines over and over, but you can’t remember what comes after the section you know. Many people recite the mnemonic “I before E, except after C.” They either don’t remember or never learned the rest of the rhyme. Here are two additional lines that reveal some exceptions to the spelling rule:
