Smartphone users, rejoice! Grammarly has finally made the long-awaited jump to mobile (both iOS and Android!), helping us improve our communication even when using our smartphones and tablets.
But how can the Grammarly keyboard really help your writing experience?
We’re glad you asked! Here are just a few of the important places Grammarly’s new keyboard can help you show up as your best self when you’re writing on mobile.
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.
Parallel sentence elements in grammar are just like parallel lines in geometry: they face the same direction and never meet.
More precisely, in grammar, it’s less about meeting and more about balance. Parallelism in grammar is defined as two or more phrases or clauses in a sentence that have the same grammatical structure.
A sentence with parallel construction makes your writing effective, classy, and certain to impress anyone who reads your stuff.
They is a third-person pronoun, usually referring to a group of something.
It is possible, however, to use they in reference to a single something (the same is true for the possessive, objective, and reflexive forms of they: their, them, and themselves). This is sometimes called the singular they.
Your email may never be opened. Sure, you wrote brilliant copy. You also took the time to craft a compelling subject line. You followed good email etiquette. But, unless you considered the best time to send an email, your message may still be destined for the trash bin.
By my conservative estimate, I’ve sent at least 100,000 emails since the early days of the Internet. (May Prodigy rest in peace.) It wasn’t until I started handling public and media relations a decade or so ago that I gave a second thought to how an email’s send time affects open rates.
Ah, the holidays! The winter festivities mean that many of us get to leave the stress of office life behind. If you’re taking an extended break, you may want to create a holiday out-of-office message to let your contacts know you’ll get back to them just as soon as the eggnog is out of your system and you’ve returned to your desk.
Within reason, it’s okay to have some fun with your out-of-office message.
Without conjunctions, you’d be forced to express every complex idea in a series of short, simplistic sentences: I like cooking. I like eating. I don’t like washing dishes afterward.
Conjunctions are words that link other words, phrases, or clauses together.
You breezed through the phone screening and your first interview went surprisingly well.
But weeks go by and you never hear back. If you do end up getting a rejection email, you’re left staring numbly at an auto-response with too many clichés and not a single explanation of why you didn’t make the cut.
And so, the vicious circle continues. How can you improve your interview game when no one is telling you what you’re doing wrong?
Thinking about the quality of writing in social media is usually enough to make English teachers the world over weep. But, it’s not all bad and it’s about time to celebrate some of the more grammar-conscious writers on social networks. This year, in honor of National Grammar Day on March 4, we decided to find social media’s celebrity grammar hero.
After analyzing the tweets of the top fifty celebrities by size of follower base, Conan O’Brien comes out on top as our #GrammarDay champion.
Remember when phones were used exclusively for making phone calls? (Hard to believe, right?) Now we use our smartphones for all sorts of fun things . . . like sending text messages, answering emails, posting on Facebook, commenting on our favorite cat videos, and even finding true love.
While the freedom and flexibility of using a mobile device is awesome—the frustration that comes from typing on a tiny touch screen is not so great.
In the days before email, Paul McCartney famously sang, “PS I love you” on The Beatles’ 1963 album, Please Please Me. But what does PS mean and how do we use it in modern communication?
PS stands for postscript. It comes from the Latin postscriptum, which literally means “written after.” A postscript is an additional thought added to letters (and sometimes other documents) that comes after it has been completed.
A cardinal axiom of good writing, “show, don’t tell” reminds authors that language is infinitely more vivid and poignant when it appeals to the senses. Writing that does this has an amnesic effect on readers, ensconcing them so deeply in the story that they forget they’re reading a story at all. Perhaps the most apt tool to cast this spell on readers is figurative language, which employs various devices that imply meaning rather than plainly stating it.
On waking up, your bleary eyes note that your phone’s alarm presents two options: “Snooze” and “OK.” Both buttons are the same size, but somehow the word snooooooze seems not only longer but vastly more alluring than the resigned okay you muffle into your pillow, followed by a pleading Don’t make me do stuff to no one.
Getting out of bed and hauling yourself to work can be unfun.
Chefs are like writers—always combining the elements of their trade to create new works of art. How else do you think we got ice cream made with liquid nitrogen? When it comes to describing food, some writers stick to common words: delicious, tasty, yummy. But eating is a multisensory experience. Here are some scrumptious food adjectives to appeal to all our senses.
Broadly speaking, an idiom is a widely used phrase that, when taken as a whole, has a particular meaning that you would not be able to deduce from the meanings of the individual words. The ubiquitous greeting “How are you doing today?” is an example of an idiom. Normally, how means “in what manner” or “to what degree.” Taken literally, the question doesn’t make a lot of sense.
There are two words that evoke instant anxiety in nearly every academic—research paper. In this article, we’ll break down the steps to writing a research paper.
Can you have two best friends? Someone posted this question on Grammarly Answers. Why a question about friendship? The grammar issue has to do with the adjective “best.” Best is a superlative. Let’s discuss what that means.
Suppose you have three rich friends. Bob has five million dollars. Bill has eight million dollars. Bernice has two million dollars. If you were comparing two friends, you would use a comparative adjective: Bill is richer than Bob.
In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, hopeful romantics take to online dating apps and send millions of messages (50 million, according to Match.com) to potential partners. What traits are they looking for in their matches? Common interests and mutual attraction are important to just about everybody, but one must-have that both men and women find important may surprise you—good grammar.
All across America, it is performance review time — the annual ritual of nervousness and wincing when everyone from interns to executives gears up to receive critical feedback about their work. In addition to the evaluation of performance and success, this is the time when managers and HR pros decide on bonuses, promotions, and raises.
While employees probably cannot turn the tide of a poor performance streak, there are behaviors you can practice that will improve your chances for a raise this review cycle or next.
