Some like it hot. Others like it cold, or cluttered, or colorful. As you can imagine, authors, poets, and playwrights find inspiration in a variety of writing environments. With Log Cabin Day coming up on June 28, the Grammarly team began thinking about the best — and most interesting — places to write.
Are you curious about where your favorite author penned his or her bestseller?
Whether you’re a decisive taskmaster or someone who struggles to choose what to eat for breakfast, you will eventually have a decision that stumps you. Sometimes, these are big life choices like taking that job, choosing that partner, or moving to that new city. Other times, seemingly small decisions like which font you should use in your presentation can trip you up.
Never fear, future decision-makers!
You just got an email from Susie in accounting asking you to bring three dozen of your famous cupcakes for Dave the office manager’s retirement party. Which, by the way, is tomorrow. Susie signed her email:
Thank you in advance,
Susie
Your reaction to that sign-off will probably depend on the tone and content of Susie’s email. If she politely apologized for the short notice and begged you to please consider whipping up what has become an office favorite (because, really, who doesn’t like cupcakes?), you might get busy baking after work.
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.
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.
If you’re leaving your job, you will need to tie up lots of loose ends. Leaving a positive impression on your colleagues is vital. How do you gracefully notify colleagues of your departure? Let’s talk about the perfect farewell message.
Sending farewell messages too early is a bad idea. People will inevitably stop by your office to wish you well face-to-face, and that could interfere with finishing up your last work tasks.
The future continuous tense, sometimes also referred to as the future progressive tense, is a verb tense that indicates that something will occur in the future and continue for an expected length of time. It is formed using the construction will + be + the present participle (the root verb + -ing).
The simple future tense is a verb tense that is used when an action is expected to occur in the future and be completed.
At your local coffee shop, do you ever see words that you don’t understand? For instance, what is java? Why is a cup of coffee called a cup of joe? Ordering a cup of coffee can feel like speaking another language! No worries, here are the meanings behind all the coffee words.
Let’s start with the words that just refer to a simple cup of coffee. The first and most puzzling is joe.
We’ve talked about the best ways to end an email; now let’s talk about beginnings.
You might wonder whether it’s really necessary to put much thought into how you begin your emails and other correspondence. If you’ve ever ignored a letter because it began with “To Whom It May Concern,” groaned because your name was misspelled, or wondered if the sender was human or canine because their greeting was so overly enthusiastic, then you know that getting your email salutation right is a big deal.
Many people dream of living and working in the USA, but no one would claim it’s easy. To secure a work visa, you’ll need a job offer before you leave – which means perfecting your CV is more important than ever. Don’t simply roll out the CV you’ve been using at home; there are a few key differences you’ll need to know first. Before you hit send, check through this list of tips to make sure American employers can easily see what a great candidate you are.
Irregular plural nouns are nouns that do not become plural by adding -s or -es, as most nouns in the English language do. You’re probably familiar with many of these already. For example, the plural form of man is men, not mans. The plural form of woman is women, not womans. There are hundreds of irregular plural nouns, and in truth, you must memorize them through reading and speaking.
Emojis may be the cutting edge of language, but do any of us really know how to use them? For example, let’s say your friend sent you a text that read, “???☺️.” Would you know that it meant “the key to success is a great attitude”? Unless you and your friend have already established emoji conventions of your own, probably not. Emojis, while an interesting communicative device, don’t yet have a formal system of grammar governing their use.
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.
Bad habits are often a real sticking point in personal development. But what if we told you that you may have some distracting habits you might not even realize are holding you back?
Here are nine tough habits that can limit your productivity, and some ideas for moving past them.
Nowadays, it’s increasingly acceptable to dress informally at work, and most of us call our managers by their first names.
In the United States and Canada, the first Monday of September is the day we call Labor Day. That holiday means different things to different people. For kids, it’s the start of a new school year. For most people, it signals the end of summer. It’s also (supposedly) a cutoff date for wearing white clothes, even though the practice of not wearing white clothes in the fall predates the establishment of Labor Day as a federal holiday.
