“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.
