The passive voice is often maligned by grammazons as a bad writing habit. Or, to put it in the active voice, grammazons across the English-speaking world malign the passive voice as a bad writing habit.
In general, the active voice makes your writing stronger, more direct, and, you guessed it, more active. The subject is something, or it does the action of the verb in the sentence.
Apostrophes can be tricky. Sometimes they form possessives. Sometimes they form contractions. Can they ever make something plural?
A contraction is a shortened form of a word (or group of words) that omits certain letters or sounds. In a contraction, an apostrophe represents missing letters. The most common contractions are made up of verbs, auxiliaries, or modals attached to other words: He would=He’d.
For a while now, we’ve been working on improvements for Grammarly Insights based on your feedback. But until recently, this was an undercover job.
So, it’s with great jubilation that we reveal some big changes making their way to your inbox next week.
1 Monitor Your Trends
Until now, the weekly emails summarized your activity over the previous seven days. Moving forward, we will graph up to four weeks’ worth of progress in the Productivity, Mastery, and Vocabulary sections.
During your job interview, your prospective employer is likely to ask you some behavioral questions. Unlike job-related questions that focus on past performance, behavioral questions help the employer get a better feel for who you are and how you’ll carry yourself on the job.
Here are some of the common behavioral interview questions you can expect, with advice and examples to help you answer them.
The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written. — Joyce Carol Oates
With 2016 coming to a close, Grammarly’s team of writing analysts took a look at the biggest trends in writing in English this year. And we found some fascinating results! Below are the grammar and writing trends that dominated 2016, as well as our predictions for the next year in written English.
A great restaurant review can point you toward your new favorite spot—or help you avoid a dining disaster. Review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor have an abundance of restaurant reviews to browse, but if you spend any time on these sites you’ll notice not all reviews are helpful.
Some reviews are positive, but are so vague that you question their legitimacy. Some might have helpful information, but are so poorly written they’re unintelligible.
Pronouns are words that stand in for a noun in a sentence. Whenever pronouns are used, it should be unmistakably clear which noun the pronoun is standing in for. A faulty pronoun reference will result in a muddled sentence and a confused reader.
A pronoun is like an actor’s double on a movie set: it is a simplified version of the noun it is standing in for.
Whether you like the tiny emotion-pictures or despise them, emojis are heavily used throughout messaging apps.
If you’re new to emojis, or you’ve long been expressing your joy with crying smiling faces and your sass with reception desk workers, you can up your game. Check out these tips to make your texts as emoji-filled as possible.
Emojis may not be language, but some of the more commonly used symbols do have accepted meanings.
For the third day of LitMas, we’re offering you three French phrases English speakers love to borrow. There’s something kind of glamorous about sprinkling foreign phrases into your conversations every now and then, don’t you think?
1 Joyeux Noël
’Tis the season of wondering what noel means. In French, Noël simply means Christmas. If you’re not sure about joyeux, go ahead and take a guess—you’re probably right.
Feeling under the weather? Walking on thin ice with your vocabulary variety? These idioms will have a snowball effect on your language use this winter. And they’re just the tip of the iceberg.
If you’re going to tell someone to calm down, why not do it in rhyme? “Chill” means a feeling of coldness, as in, “there was a chill in the air.” Sometime in recent decades, probably the 1970s, the word also came to mean “relax”—just imagine a hippie flower child flashing a peace sign and saying “Chill out, dude.”
To share or not to share? That’s the twenty-first-century Hamlet’s dilemma. With good reason: if you post those pictures of the weekend’s booze cruise, will a potential employer pass you over?
Here’s the answer: set the privacy on those pics to friends-only. More and more employers are scoping candidates on social media, so the image you present could affect your prospects.
There are many celebrated writers in this world, but few ever reach the rockstar-level status of dark fantasy author Neil Gaiman.
Fans stand in line for hours at his book signings, only to faint when they finally meet him (or ask him to sign their body so they can get his signature tattooed).
His beloved novels and comics—Coraline, Stardust, American Gods, Good Omens, and The Sandman (to name a few)—have gained cult followings and been adapted for the big screen and television.
If your work consists largely of moving words around on a screen, being understood is essential. At no time is this more evident than when workplace communications fail.
Say your team has been coordinating a crucial media announcement for weeks. You’ve gathered input from scientists and software developers at your company to clarify the details of your message, you’ve run the language past your boss and a company lawyer—you’ve even sat down with an executive to make sure your tone is on brand.
Though A Song of Ice and Fire was not written to be a writing guide, there are many valuable lessons in the epic that can be broadly applied to different facets of life.
Spoiler alert
In this post, we will be analyzing characters and their development throughout book five of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and season seven of HBO’s Game of Thrones to understand what lessons certain characters can offer to improve your writing.
First, second, and third person are ways of describing points of view.
When we talk about ourselves, our opinions, and the things that happen to us, we generally speak in the first person. The biggest clue that a sentence is written in the first person is the use of first-person pronouns.
There’s no silver bullet to get you the job you want, but power words might be the closest thing.
What are power words, you ask? Power words are buzzwords and special phrases that signal to a company that you’re on their wavelength. Use them to tailor your application to a specific company and show that you know their mission, their approach, and their values—and that you’ve done your homework.
Even rats have habits. MIT professor Ann Graybiel trained rats to run a T-shaped maze. First, Graybiel’s team rewarded the rats for turning right or left based on a tone. Even after the researchers stopped giving treats, they found that the rats still responded to the sounds as if by habit. The human brain forms habits too, so why not make them rewarding ones? Here are four reasons why proofreading should be a habit you pursue.
We all know that proofreading is important—it doesn’t matter if you’re a native speaker or just learning English. Nothing is worse than turning in a project you worked hard on, only to discover that it’s full of typos, misspellings, and grammatical mistakes. But proofreading your own writing is tough. Sometimes your brain sees what you meant to write instead of what’s actually on the page.
You work hard. You’d like to see your efforts rewarded. In an ideal world, your superiors would recognize your talent and offer you a promotion. But advancing is rarely that easy. We’ve compiled the ultimate guide to asking for a promotion. Read on if climbing the career ladder is in your sights!
