An adverb is a word that modifies (describes) a verb (he sings loudly), an adjective (very tall), another adverb (ended too quickly), or even a whole sentence (Fortunately, I had brought an umbrella). Adverbs often end in -ly, but some (such as fast) look exactly the same as their adjective counterparts.
Tom is very tall.
There’s no doubt that being a manager has its perks — increased prestige, recognition from upper management, and a higher paycheck among them. But as with anything worth aspiring to, it’s not all fun and games. As a manager, there are plenty of times you’ll find yourself in tough spots. Maybe you need to let someone know they’re no longer a good fit for their role or smooth things over with an upset client.
If you are shy or socially awkward, you probably hate networking. Even if you find it difficult to approach professionals in your field, you can still alleviate some of the stress with these ten useful networking tips.
1 Know who will be there.
To be forewarned is to be forearmed. Knowing the attendees in advance gives you the chance to beef up on the company’s goals and show interest in its latest achievements.
As technology improves, it’s faster and easier than ever to get words from brain to screen. We’ve progressed from dipping utensils in ink to using speech recognition software to dictate an entire Slate article. Here’s the evolution of writing tools at a glance.
Writers initially used reed or bamboo pens, feather quills, ink brushes, or dip pens, all of which were dipped into ink and then placed on papyrus or paper.
Close your eyes. Imagine words as people in an office setting. The verbs scurry about, active and animated, getting things done. The adjectives and adverbs conjure ideas and images in the marketing department. But there’s always that one guy. See him? He’s over by the water cooler, leaning against the wall. He’s omnipresent, and yet nobody really knows what he does. He may be hanging around, but he sure doesn’t seem to be pulling his weight.
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!
How to start a letter, what type of letter you should write, what letter format you should choose—everyone should be familiar with these basics of letter writing. Here’s the information you need to know, along with some helpful examples.
There are no hard-and-fast rules. What letter format you choose depends on your audience. For a friend or close relative, a casual, handwritten message is usually the best way to go.
You could spend hours polishing your LinkedIn profile. As someone who has stared at several LinkedIn profiles to give recommendations, I know the hole you can fall into when you’re looking for a new job and need to “spruce up” your LinkedIn page.
Although you could take serious time to critically review, edit, and re-review each section of your profile, you probably shouldn’t. Your LinkedIn page is vital for landing a new role, with 87 percent of recruiters using LinkedIn to vet candidates, according to data from Jobvite.
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.
An abbreviation, simply put, is a shortened form of a word. In writing, abbreviations are useful when you need to squeeze a lot of writing into a small space. You can also use them in place of long or cumbersome phrases to make your sentences easier to read.
One thing to remember about abbreviations is that certain ones are considered informal. If you are writing something very formal, it’s better to err on the side of spelling things out.
You sit down. You stare at your screen. The cursor blinks. So do you. Anxiety sets in. Where do you begin when you want to create an article that will earn you clicks, comments, and social shares? This simple formula will show you how to write a blog post by guiding you from blank page to finished work.
I know quite a few writers whose abandoned personal blogs are languishing in some dark corner of the Internet.
A metaphor is a figure of speech that describes an object or action in a way that isn’t literally true, but helps explain an idea or make a comparison.
Here are the basics:
Remember to check your knowledge at the end with our Metaphor vs.
Your perfect job with the perfect company may not be advertised. So, how do you find gigs from within the hidden job market? You ask about them. Here’s how to write a letter of interest that will get you noticed . . . and maybe even result in a job.
Years ago, before I was the full-blown word monkey that I am today, I relocated to a new city. I’d left a job I loved—doing marketing for a dog grooming school.
There’s a lot of writing on the Internet, our blog included.
For the past 12 months, we’ve offered writing tips, advice for job- and promotion-seeking members of the workforce, quizzes to test your lust for language, and much, much more.
Out of the hundreds of posts authored on this here blog, we’ve picked out ten of our staff’s favorite posts. They represent the breadth of content you can find on our blog and our in our weekly newsletter.
Networking is an artform. When you’re good at it, you become a Michelangelo, finely crafting relationships that will advance your career. But when your skills need work, you’re that guy on the street corner hawking pictures of Elvis painted on black velvet. Nobody responds to that guy’s email.
I’ve been writing and sending networking outreach for twenty years as a business owner, freelance writer, and media relations expert.
Leaving for vacation? Heading to a work conference? Beset with the flu? You’re taking a break from email correspondence, which means it’s time to set up the dreaded “out of office” message. Not only is it a bore to write, most people will be less than delighted to read it when they were expecting a real response from you.
But what if you could turn this necessary evil into a way of engaging with people that’s informative, memorable, and even fun?
Quotation marks are used to identify words that someone has said. You’ll often find them in fiction, where they signify dialogue, the words spoken by the characters. In newspapers, journalists use quotation marks to signify that something is a direct quote from a person in the article. In academic papers, quotation marks can signify that you are quoting material that was written by someone else.
You asked, and today it’s here! The Grammarly Keyboard is now available on iOS. It’s your personal editor for texts, emails, tweets, Tinder messages, and everything else you write on your phone. (Don’t worry, Android is coming soon.)
For nearly a decade, Grammarly has helped people make their writing clear, effective, and mistake-free. Ten million users a day benefit from Grammarly’s feedback on their messages and documents.
Maybe you’re in it for writing advice. Or maybe you want to know what your favorite writers do in their actual lives. Maybe you just need a distraction and want to look at cats, food, or cartoons, but also want feel a little intellectual while you’re at it.
Don’t fret. Everyone looks at social media for “inspiration,” whether they realize it or not.
Whatever your motivation may be, we’ve gathered twenty of the best Instagram accounts operated by professional writers (or about or related to professional writing).
Every year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences creates a Hollywood spectacle to honor the best films, actors, screenwriters, directors, and more. Before the Academy rolls out the red carpet on February 28 to announce 2016’s Oscar winners, we decided to roll out the red pen (metaphorically speaking) and rank the movies, actors, and actresses by how well their fans write when they’re buzzing about them online.
Have you ever wondered how introverted or extroverted your work style is? This short quiz will help you understand whether your writing personality tends toward introversion or extroversion.
What kind of writing personality do you have? What parts of writing are easy or challenging for you? Share your stories in the comments.
There are days when it all comes together for you, but this might not happen to be one of them.
Some days you’re able to just crank through one task after another. Your “sent” folder brims with solid work before noon, your contribution to the afternoon meeting is well received, and you even manage to wrap up with enough time and energy to hit the gym before dinner. If only someone could bottle up days like this, you muse.
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.
Parentheses are punctuation marks that are used to set off information within a text or paragraph. Outside the realm of emoticons, parentheses always come in pairs. They can enclose a single word, a phrase, or even an entire sentence. Typically, the words inside the parentheses provide extra information about something else in the sentence.
Let’s use this example to understand what a simile is:
An infinitive is a simple verb combined with ‘to.’ For example: to sleep, to run, to fly, to hide
Remember this formula: Infinitive = to + verb
Infinitives can function as subjects, objects, adjectives, and adverbs. For example:
To wait for an answer seemed like a waste of time. (To wait is the subject of the sentence.)
I can’t stand it; I refuse to look. (To look is the direct object of the sentence.)
A dash is a little horizontal line that floats in the middle of a line of text (not at the bottom: that’s an underscore). It’s longer than a hyphen and is commonly used to indicate a range or a pause. Dashes are used to separate groups of words, not to separate parts of words like a hyphen does. There are three forms of dashes: em, en, and the double hyphen.
The most common types of dashes are the en dash (–) and the em dash (—).
A contraction is a shortened form of a word (or group of words) that omits certain letters or sounds. In most contractions, an apostrophe represents the missing letters. The most common contractions are made up of verbs, auxiliaries, or modals attached to other words: He would=He’d. I have=I’ve. They are=They’re. You cannot=You can’t.
Contractions are common in speech—so common that we don’t always take the time to pronounce them precisely, which leads to a particular contraction mistake writers might make if they’re not paying attention.
Job searching is like dating: each side involved is trying to find the perfect fit. You’re sizing up an employer to see if they’ve got what it takes to make you happy. The employer is evaluating whether you can make their dreams come true as a productive, successful team member.
However, much like dating, there are some behaviors that can be a turn-off. No, we’re not talking about things like mansplaining at the dinner table or endlessly sharing stories about an ex.
In today’s competitive job market, how you communicate with potential employers can make your skills stand out. Making sure you effectively express yourself, accurately represent your abilities, and stay present throughout the process is what makes the difference in ultimately receiving a job offer.
Your first interaction with your desired company is likely to happen through writing.
Email has transformed the way we communicate. However, just because it’s easy and quick like many other kinds of digital communication doesn’t mean you should skip all forethought about how your message is received—literally and figuratively.
Email etiquette matters, especially as email increasingly becomes our more formal mode of communication. Take this quiz to find out whether you’re a master of email manners or you have some schooling left!
In ancient times (circa 1995), so-called “cell phones” were designed exclusively for making phone calls. But these days we spend a lot more time typing on our smartphones than talking.
We use our mobile devices for everything—texting, email, posting to social media, Slacking with coworkers, commenting on our favorite blogs, and flirting with our latest matches. There’s even a growing number of authors tapping out entire novels on their mobile devices.
“All you need to land an interview is a good set of skills.”
If only that were true! Besides possessing skills, you have to present them in a way that gets noticed and shows that you are right for the job. Which skills should you showcase? What are the best ways to show skills on your resume? Let’s find out now.
Would you say that you should list all your capabilities on your resume?
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.
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. To maintain a professional profile while job hunting, make sure you avoid these nine dangerous don’ts on social media.
Networking can be a challenge.
There’s more to it than just researching events, identifying contacts, and following up. You also have to balance talking about your goals and interests against getting to know others. Effective networking is as much an art as a science.
This quiz will guide you through some key aspects of effective networking and help you understand how good a networker you are.
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.
An intensive pronoun is almost identical to a reflexive pronoun, but their functions differ. Intensive pronouns are used to add emphasis to the subject or antecedent of the sentence. You’ll usually find the intensive pronoun right after the noun or pronoun it’s modifying, but not necessarily.
The intensive/reflexive pronouns include myself, yourself, himself, herself, itself, ourselves, yourselves, themselves.
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. There’s good reason you insist on getting paid to do it, after all.
There are two types of slashes: a backslash () and a forward slash (/). The backslash is used only for computer coding. The forward slash, often simply referred to as a slash, is a punctuation mark used in English. The only time it is appropriate to use a comma after a slash is when demonstrating breaks between lines of poetry, songs, or plays.
An explanation of what a forward slash means in a text depends on the context.
How do teachers motivate students to embrace good grammar 365 days of the year and not just on World Teachers’ Day? These ten grammar resources might be just what you need.
1 Visual Aids
If students visualize how grammar works, they will be able to understand sentence structure. For example, an infographic on Copyblogger.com explains what a dangling participle is. Here’s their example sentence: “After rotting in the cellar for weeks, my brother brought up some oranges.” The illustration of a zombie holding an orange helps students see that sentence structure matters.
Anyone who has ever had to memorize a tough-to-spell English word (It’s fuchsia, right? Or is it fuschia? Fushia?) has noticed that the spelling of some words is wildly different from the way we pronounce them. To make matters worse, some words are spelled differently in American English and British English. If it makes you feel any better, the eccentricities of English spelling weren’t invented just to make life difficult for writers.
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.
Ouch! Oh my! Wow! Yikes!
If you’ve ever uttered any of the words above, you’ve used an interjection, whether you knew it at the time or not. The word interjection comes from the Latin words inter (between) and jacĕre (to throw). So, an interjection is a word that you throw in between sentences or thoughts to express a sudden feeling.
Because interjections usually express sudden feelings, you’ll often see them used to convey surprise (both good surprises and bad ones) or excitement.
Making a point in a clear, assertive email is one thing. But doing it in a text? LOL, way 2 much 4 txtspk.
Or is it?
Sure, you don’t have as much leeway in a text as in an email because of sheer lack of space, but it is possible to make a point, ask for something important, or express a serious idea in a text message. Here are some tips for how to make it so.
As in, “you,” “for,” “today,” “thanks.” Writing in real-speak instead of text-speak shows that you’re serious.
Miss, Mrs., and Ms. are not interchangeable terms. Choosing the wrong title can cause offense, so it’s important to know the difference between the three titles. The guide below will describe how the titles Miss, Mrs., and Ms. have been used traditionally—but remember, if someone tells you they prefer a particular title, that’s the one you should use to address them.
You’re 96 percent sure that you are ready to schedule a meeting with your boss to ask for a raise. Or perhaps you’re nearing the end of the job interview process and an offer is in sight. However, if you’re like me, you have definitely put your foot in your mouth a time or two saying the wrong thing at the absolute worst moment. Doh!
Don’t mess up.
Don’t mess up.
No matter how many times you rehearse what to say, there’s always that risk of fumbling right at the five-yard line.
The future perfect is a verb tense used for actions that will be completed before some other point in the future.
Key words: Verb, past participle, tense, preposition
The future perfect tense is for talking about an action that will be completed between now and some point in the future.
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.
When you’re speaking out loud, homophones sound alike, but when you’re writing them out, it’s a different story. Though they have the same pronunciation, homophones may have slightly different spellings and totally different definitions. Since using the wrong one can completely change the meaning of your statement, it’s important to make sure you have the right word in mind. Here are seven homophone mistakes to avoid.
Since the early days of AOL (“You’ve got mail!”), I’ve spent countless hours in the email trenches working in jobs that ranged from customer service rep to online community manager to managing editor to PR representative. I’ve done the math, and even estimating at an ultra-conservative ten emails per day over twenty years, I’ve sent at least 73,000 emails. Those experiences, both good and bad, taught me what to do and what not to do.
You don’t always respond to emails right away. In fact, sometimes you put them off until the next day, the next week, or—downcast gaze—the next month. At some point the calculus shifts from “Can I somehow compose an email that justifies my glacially slow response-time?” to “Would it be easier to just fake my death instead?”
While it doesn’t look or feel great, sometimes you have to own up to sleeping on someone’s message.
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.
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 LinkedIn profile is likely among the top—and thus most clicked—results if someone happens to Google you. And a well-curated LinkedIn summary can offer them a wealth of information about your professional background. So whether you’re just quietly cruising through options or firing off applications like it’s your other job, you want your profile to shine.
Maybe you’ve already done the obvious, making hundreds of connections and racking up tons of endorsements.
You screwed up. Now it’s time to own it. Knowing how to apologize is a crucial life and career skill. But when you write an apology letter, creating a permanent record of an event and your response to it, it’s all the more important that you get it right.
Apologizing is an art form few of us seem to master. We don’t want to admit our mistakes because we think that making mistakes reflects badly on our character.
It’s that time of year… when you dread every interaction because you don’t know whether to say “Merry Christmas,” “Happy Holidays,” “Season’s Greetings,” or maybe some secret salutation you don’t even know yet. So what are you supposed to say?
In general, “Happy Holidays” is accepted as the broadest and most inclusive greeting at this time of year. If you know someone celebrates Christmas you can go with “Merry Christmas,” but ‘tis the season for interacting with strangers (selling to them, buying from them, bumping into them on your way out of Target).
Few tasks among a manager’s responsibilities stir up as many mixed feelings as writing performance reviews. We’ve scoured expert resources to bring you examples of how to communicate your company’s needs and encourage productivity without breaking morale.
It’s easy to extol an employee’s virtues, but things get tougher when you’re faced with assessing their challenges and keeping your feedback constructive.
Hard to spell but easy to use, an onomatopoeia (ahn-uh-mat-uh-PEE-uh) is a word that sounds like what it means.
If you think for a minute, you can probably come up with lots of examples. Hiss, snip, thud, clonk . . . Comic books are a great place to look for onomatopoeias in action. Pow!
Or, try thinking about a barnyard. Most languages have onomatopoeic words for the sounds animals make.
A noun is a word that names something: either a person, place, or thing. In a sentence, nouns can play the role of subject, direct object, indirect object, subject complement, object complement, appositive, or adjective.
Nouns form a large proportion of English vocabulary and they come in a wide variety of types. Nouns can name a person:
The ability to communicate is a valuable asset. Good communicators make more money. Studies show that oral communication is one of the most important competencies for college grads entering the workforce. Successful entrepreneurs are more likely to be excellent communicators, and that’s no coincidence.
A family member of mine once had an amazing idea for a gadget. In fact, it was such a good idea that he worked on perfecting it until he was able to secure a U.S.
Hey Android users! Since launching the Grammarly Keyboard for iOS, we’ve heard from lots of you wondering when the app would be available on Android. Well, first, we want to thank you for your patience. And second, we’re pleased to tell you that today’s the day! The Grammarly Keyboard is now available on both iOS and Android.
Life happens on the go. By 2018, 50 percent of workplace communication and collaboration will happen through mobile apps.
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?
You want this job! It’s a perfect fit for your skills and you know you’d rock it. You send out an impressive résumé and cover letter and you’re thrilled when you’re offered an interview. You rehearse answers to the questions you might be asked, and by the time you meet with the hiring manager, you’re able to dazzle her with your articulate and well-thought-out responses. You leave the interview knowing you’ve nailed it.
It’s the day of the big interview for your dream job. You’ve been prepping for weeks. You know the company in and out. You know why you’re the best candidate for the job. You’re ready to talk about your skills, weaknesses, ideas, plans, hopes, dreams, and favorite TV show.
And then they ask: any questions for us? And you’ve got nothing.
Don’t be that person. Acing an interview doesn’t just mean knowing all the answers to the questions that get thrown at you: it also involves having a good set of questions to ask them.
Most singular nouns are made plural by simply putting an -s at the end. There are many different rules regarding pluralization depending on what letter a noun ends in. Irregular nouns do not follow plural noun rules, so they must be memorized or looked up in the dictionary.
There are many plural noun rules, and because we use nouns so frequently when writing, it’s important to know all of them!
Your recent work history is a bit flighty.
No position in the last few years has lasted longer than a year or so.
There are already so many ways to mess up in an interview.
You have great skills and dedication; how do you communicate it to a hiring team when your resume screams something else?
Here are our best tips for handling frequent career changes during the hiring process.
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.
Maybe you don’t love holly or snowmen. Or winter jingles. Or trying to manage the list of gifts you’ll need to buy, wrap, and present to your loved ones. Heck, maybe every year you get stuck holding down the office for weeks on end while half the staff is away. Still, you want to power through this—to scream “come at me December, I can take you on!”
Nothing says “I am undaunted by the demands of the winter holidays and am not merely soldiering through—I am here to dominate” like a greeting card.
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.
If you’ve heard of Glassdoor, odds are that you know you can find company ratings on our site. But while this is an important part of your job hunt research, the truth is that Glassdoor offers so much more than that (including job listings — more on that later!). So if you’re only looking at a company’s rating in order to assess what it’s like to work there, you’re missing out. But with so much information available, what exactly should you focus on?
A mixed construction is a sentence with incompatible elements that begins with one type of structure and shifts to another type of structure. In these sentences, the speaker sets out to say one thing and abruptly switches to something else, resulting in confusion.
A sentence that is logical has a subject and a predicate. When a subject is introduced in a sentence, an expectation is set up about the grammatical direction the sentence is going in, and when that expectation is not met, the sentence does not sound right.
Imagine you were trying to get a job fifty years ago. You would find a job listing in a newspaper, set up an in-person interview, and walk in with your resume to introduce yourself to the company.
Today, LinkedIn has taken the place of the newspaper, your resume, and even that first meeting. Your presence on LinkedIn matters. In fact, 87 percent of recruiters will vet your candidacy by visiting your LinkedIn profile, according to data from Jobvite.
Semicolons (;) are as basic as a period stacked on top of a comma. Does that mean you can use it like either one? Don’t get your hopes up. But don’t let this punctuation mark get you down, either. After all, that sly emoticon winky eye can’t be all bad. 😉
The most common use of the semicolon is to join two independent clauses without using a conjunction like and.
The last thing you want to worry about when ringing in the new year is where to put the apostrophe. Get the nitty-gritty on New Year, New Year’s, and New Years so you can make a toast at midnight and get your punctuation right while you’re at it.
When is it “New Year’s”?
Use the apostrophe-S in “New Year’s” when you’re talking about December 31 or January 1 resolutions you’re making, or other things that “belong” to the New Year.
Ever reach the end of the day and wonder where all your time went?
I keep reading articles where the author points out that all of us—from millionaires to humble knowledge workers—have the same twenty-four hours in the day.
Sure, this is meant to be inspiring (you too can achieve your dreams!), but when it’s already noon and I’ve barely started my to-do list . . . it just feels depressing.
While both similes and metaphors are used to make comparisons, the difference between similes and metaphors comes down to a word. Similes use the words like or as to compare things—“Life is like a box of chocolates.” In contrast, metaphors directly state a comparison—“Love is a battlefield.”
Here are some examples of similes and metaphors:
Life is like a box of chocolates. (Simile) My life is an open book.
The exclamation mark, also called an exclamation point, is a punctuation mark that goes at the end of certain sentences. It’s less common than the period or question mark, but it’s very easy to use. Some might say it’s too easy to use.
Periods go at the end of declarative sentences, question marks go at the end of interrogative sentences, and exclamation marks go at the end of exclamatory sentences.
Submitting your application and waiting for a response from employers can be an excruciating process. Especially when you’re not hearing back and wondering if something’s amiss with your résumé. These ten expert tips will help you freshen up your résumé so you can land the interview.
It’s 2017, and we’re in a job seeker’s market. Employers are competing for top candidates.
Thanks to the fine folks at Merriam-Webster, our dictionaries continue to get heavier and even more robust than they were twelve months ago.
As language evolves and new words continue to flood our lexicon, it’s good to have more ammunition for any conversation or correspondence you encounter. When new phrases from popular culture get cosigned and introduced into our language, it’s important to recognize the terms that make you stop and think and appreciate our evolving forms of communication.
Does your phone’s autocorrect drive you crazy?
Maybe it’s never caught on that you’re “doing well”. . . not “doing we’ll.” No matter how many times you type “gave” it still insists you meant to say “have.” Or it may even think that swapping words like “baked” and “naked,” or “stapler” and “stalker,” is a good idea. (It’s not.)
That feeling when autocorrect does the wrong ‘its’ in a reply to someone with a huge following… pic.twitter.com/gWy8m1zbGl
There are up to five forms for each verb: root, third-person singular, present participle, past, and past participle.
The root form of a verb is the base form of the word. Roots have not been conjugated and do not include prefixes or suffixes.
The root form of the verb is the same as the infinitive form with “to” removed. See the examples below: to see – see
to be – be
Just like food, your writing needs spice. Keep these tips in your cupboard to take your writing from bland to scrumptious.
About a year ago, I got interested in cooking. For most of my adult life, I’d been making things like spaghetti with sauce from a jar, macaroni and cheese complete with powdered “cheese,” and the occasional boxed meal (just add ground beef!). Sometimes, I went a little wild and threw some canned tuna into the mac and cheese, or added real frozen broccoli to the boxed meal.
Indefinite articles are used when we are referring to an unspecified thing or quantity. We use them when we don’t know (or don’t care) which thing we’re talking about.
There once was a sheep.
Since I don’t know which sheep it was—that is, I don’t know its name, where it’s from, or anything about it—I can’t say the sheep.
The two indefinite articles in English are a and an.
Merry LitMas Eve!
If you recall, LitMas is our made-up bookish holiday to celebrate all things nerdy and word-related before the holidays. So far, we’ve given you everything from winter quotes to Christmas grammar fails, and we’ve loved every minute of it. Although we’re sad to see this nerdy holiday season come to a close, our penultimate gift will be sweet. Literally.
Because we know food is a large part of any holiday, we’ve collected some of our favorite holiday food words.
Ask any job seeker or employee about salary negotiations and one of the most popular responses is, “I would negotiate but I don’t know what to say.” Having the right words to say, or write, during a salary negotiation is vital. Communication can make or break discussions and impact your ability to get paid fairly.
First things first, determine your current worth in the job market. Use Know Your Worth to receive a custom salary estimate based on your title, company, location and experience.
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.
You don’t have to be an introvert to dread networking events. Initiating conversations with total strangers can feel a bit like going on a blind date—the results could be magical, or painfully awkward.
Though networking in person doesn’t have to be a nightmare, it can still be difficult to fit into your busy schedule.
Online networking via your smartphone has the distinct advantage of happening whenever and wherever is convenient for you.
Using hyphens to connect words is easy.
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.
Writers love em dashes as much as hunters love Swiss army knives. It’s not difficult to understand why. Like the utilitarian knife, em dashes are versatile tools. Once you find out about these handy dashes, you may fall in love with them too.
Em dashes differ from other dashes not only in usage, which we will discuss shortly, but also in appearance. In fact, the em dash is named after its length—it’s about the same width as the capital letter M.
Today, 80 percent of Internet users own a smartphone. It’s been predicted that, by this year, eight in ten email users will access their email accounts exclusively from their mobile devices. We’re reading and writing more emails on mobile than ever, so getting it right has never been more important. Getting communication right (in email or otherwise) is the driving force behind Grammarly’s recent launch of a mobile keyboard for iOS and Android.
Today, millions of online voices will cry out, “May the 4th be with you!” to celebrate Star Wars Day. When it comes to space, two franchises arguably rule the sci-fi universe—Star Wars and Star Trek. One struggles fiercely for independence in a galaxy far, far away while the other explores strange new worlds, seeking out new life and new civilizations. We wanted to see what things are unique about the way their fandoms communicate, so we took a broad look at the writing styles and accuracy of their Reddit fan communities by analyzing nearly 2,000 comments.
That typo or grammar goof you just made in an email might make a bad impression. It could signal that you lack attention to detail. At worst, it could make you seem less intelligent, conscientious, and trustworthy.
Although email typos happen to everyone, they happen less frequently to those who take a little extra time to proofread. Here’s a foolproof step-by-step guide to getting it right before you hit send.
You work hard. You’re excited about your career. Isn’t it about time you had a job promotion?
You’re eager to move up the ladder, but navigating the maze of company politics feels stressful and confusing. If you’re not sure how to ask, when to ask, or what to ask, it may be time to call in the professionals.
Here are five of the best career books that will help you advance faster, have greater success, and make more money.
“Vampires! Zombies! Werewolves!” “Where?!” “Behind you!”
Adjectives are words that describe the qualities or states of being of nouns: enormous, doglike, silly, yellow, fun, fast. They can also describe the quantity of nouns: many, few, millions, eleven.
Most students learn that adjectives are words which modify (describe) a noun. Adjectives do not modify verbs or adverbs or other adjectives.
When I was a novice writer, I chafed at the idea of using an outline. I was certain organizing my thoughts in advance would stifle my creativity and make my writing stiff and uninspired. After all, how can serendipity happen if you’ve got everything planned?
But then I started creating content for a living, and I needed to turn out several polished articles every week. I write at least 240,000 words per year to earn my keep.
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.
Hyperbole (hi-PER-buh-lee) is language that is obviously exaggerated and not meant to be taken literally. Writers often use hyperbole for emphasis or to be funny.
You can find hyperbole in plenty of English idioms: She’s asked a million questions. You could have knocked me over with a feather. He’s as quiet as a mouse. Now I’ve seen everything.
Hyperbole, like metaphors and similes, is a type of figurative language.
Imagine you need to write down a phone number, but you don’t have any paper handy. What would you use? Some scribble on a receipt, a napkin, or even their hands. Others repeat the number mentally until they locate a sheet of paper. It’s true; necessity is the mother of invention. In other words, people often generate creative solutions if they need something not readily available.
Recently Grammarly asked its social media communities which writing mistakes were the worst kinds of errors. Our fans tend to find substantive grammatical trip-ups, like verb errors, far more frustrating than typographical errors and “stylistic” errors, such as homophone misspelling and preposition placement.
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Grammar snobs love to tell anyone who will listen: You should NEVER end a sentence with a preposition! Luckily for those poor, persecuted prepositions, that just isn’t true. Here are a few preposition guidelines:
A colon introduces an element or series of elements that illustrates or amplifies the information that preceded the colon. While a semicolon normally joins two independent clauses to signal a close connection between them, a colon does the job of directing you to the information following it.
Many people are confused about using colons, but their function is actually quite straightforward.
The holidays are upon us, and these winter celebrations with their many traditions each have a rich and varied vocabulary.
From Krampus to kinara, latke to plum pudding, frankincense to yule—there’s a whole host of fantastic holiday words to explore.
So broaden your lexicon and enter the holiday spirit with these fifty awesome holiday words!
A Latin word meaning “coming;” the Christian season of expectant waiting and preparation beginning four Sundays before Christmas.
It’s an exciting day—your first at a new job. And it’s the kind of gig you could get used to: Sitting in a comfortable chair and handling emails isn’t exactly backbreaking labor, right? But parts of it may not come naturally to you, at least not right away.
Maybe you want the emails you draft to project confidence and control, but are nervous about arranging each part in the right order.
It’s National Novel Writing Month, and that means that writers around the world are working hard to write an entire book during the month of November. Congratulations to everyone who has taken on this challenge—it’s no easy task!
To help you with your masterpiece-in-progress, we compiled a list of the most frequent writing mistakes we encountered as we edited our 2014 NaNoWriMo project, a crowdsourced novel called Frozen by Fire.
What do you call three periods in a row? Take your time, we’ll wait . . .
Those three little dots are called an ellipsis (plural: ellipses). The term ellipsis comes from the Greek word meaning “omission,” and that’s just what an ellipsis does—it shows that something has been left out. When you’re quoting someone, you can use an ellipsis to show that you’ve omitted some of their words.
The key to understanding when to use was or were in a sentence is determining whether you need to use the subjunctive mood or not. A verb is in the subjunctive mood if it expresses an action or state that is not reality. For example, it might be hypothetical, wished for, or conditional.
To better see what we are up against when deciding when to use was or were, let’s compare the past and subjunctive conjugations of to be side by side.
Do you know where the seven-day week came from?
Your first inclination may be to assume that the seven-day week is based on some celestial phenomenon, like the year (loosely based on the earth’s orbital period) or the month (which was supposedly invented to mimic lunar cycles). Unfortunately, you’d be wrong.
The seven-day week, like the five-day workweek it encompasses, is completely man-made.
In the hierarchy of things that drive grammar sticklers mad, to and too are near the top. It’s very common to see them confused, abused, and misused, and not just in YouTube comments or on Reddit.
There’s no doubt that electronic communication is fast and convenient, but there’s one time of year when we seem to prefer a more conventional approach. Americans send 1.6 billion holiday cards by postal mail annually, proving that we still favor tradition when the days get shorter and the year draws to a close.
A Little History Sir Henry Cole of London commissioned the first Christmas card in 1843 by having an artist create an image for a holiday greeting.
Every employer has an ideal candidate in mind at the start of the hiring process. The “Why should we hire you?” question affords you the perfect opportunity to prove you are that candidate.
We all hate having to answer this question, but when you consider it from an employer’s perspective you can see why every interviewer asks it. You wouldn’t buy a new car without first doing your homework to ensure you’re getting the best value for your money.
How’s your email game? Are people happy to correspond with you, or are they leaving you hanging?
The quality of your email communication can significantly impact how you’re perceived by others (especially in business). And though we all do our best to write like a boss, grammatical errors still creep in.
Fortunately we can learn from our own (and others’) mistakes. So as the year wraps up, let’s take a moment to reflect on the fifteen most common email mistakes made by Grammarly users in 2017 and find out what we can all do to step up our email game in 2018.
Get out the pruning shears: a big part of good writing is good editing. And a surefire way to give your writing a confidence boost is to eliminate words that weigh down your writing and make you sound uncertain.
We call these weasel words. Like weasels, they’re not necessarily bad on their own. In fact, they’re kind of cute. But weasels are known for escaping situations (ever heard of someone “weaseling out” of something?).
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a magic word you could say in order to get people to agree with you? If, for example, a simple utterance of “abracadabra” could instantly convince your employer to see things your way, salary negotiations would be a whole lot easier.
Unfortunately, we live in the real world, and those magic words that guarantee instant success don’t quite exist — but the good news is, we’ve got the next best thing.
After a delightful meal, have you ever sent your compliments to the chef? Finishing a great novel can leave you with the same urge to congratulate the brilliant mind behind it. Did you know you can leave a message for your favorite author on Facebook? Besides messages, Facebook offers you the opportunity to discover a lot about your favorite writer. Let’s look at the pages of thirteen professional writers!
When two words are used together to yield a new meaning, a compound is formed. Compound words can be written in three ways: as open compounds (spelled as two words, e.g., ice cream), closed compounds (joined to form a single word, e.g., doorknob), or hyphenated compounds (two words joined by a hyphen, e.g., long-term). Sometimes, more than two words can form a compound (e.g., mother-in-law).
When a pronoun replaces a noun, the noun is called an antecedent.
Michael is the antecedent and he is the pronoun. The antecedent doesn’t have to go before the pronoun, but putting the pronoun first can make long or complex sentences harder to follow.
Last night, I performed at a local open mike. I’ve been singing forever. Performing was even a legitimate side hustle for me for about seventeen years. But at the open mike, I was sitting at the piano in front of a group of talented fellow musicians, and I was nervous as hell.
Even so, I got up there under the lights, sat down at the piano, and surrendered to the music. When I stepped from the stage, the musicians and guests gathered in the little performance space murmured their approval, letting me know they thought my singing and playing had been solid.
By Laura Wallis for The Stir by CafeMom
Words that sound alike but have different meanings and spellings are called homophones, and especially for kids who are just learning to spell, they can cause trouble every time. There are some rules to help budding writers remember the trickiest homophones, but in many cases it’s just a matter of memory. There, their . . . they’ll get them in time.
