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.
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.
Spell-checkers have come a long way since a West Coast beach boy with an FBI record invented the first prototype at MIT in the 1960s. Nowadays, the überhelpful technology is not only ubiquitous in all word processors, quietly creating more error-free writing around the world, it also exists online, where it can point out mistakes in real time while we write emails or post on social media.
Did moms come up with Mother’s Day as an easy way to get pancakes in bed? Did activists fight for its adoption as a way to get folks to focus on peace? Or did card companies invent it as a way to make a few (billion) bucks?
If you answered all of the above, you’re right. Well, at least partially. Peace activists did play a role in early versions of Mother’s Day, and makers of cards and candy (not to mention florists) do get to rake in the rewards the second week of May every year.
Conditional verbs are used to create conditional sentences, which express hypothetical or unlikely situations. Conditional verbs can be used in the past, present, or future tense, and auxiliary verbs like can/could, will/would, and may/might are important in forming conditionals.
Consider the following conditional sentences, and pay close attention to the conditional verbs in each of them:
English is a language made up almost entirely of other languages. Between the fifth and seventh centuries, tribes from lands that would become Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands showed up in Britain. The languages they spoke developed into Middle English, butted heads with Old Norman (pre-French), and, in Shakespeare’s time, got a dose of Latin and Ancient Greek. Along the way, individual words from a host of other languages were added to the mix.
I would like to be remembered as someone who was not afraid to do what she wanted to do, and as someone who took risks along the way in order to achieve her goals.
Did you know May 26 is Sally Ride day?
Sally Ride was an astronaut, physicist, and science educator—and she shattered one of the highest glass ceilings to become the first American woman in space.
Throughout her life she inspired millions and defied gender stereotypes at every turn.
In some ways, everyone is a writer. Have you thought about how much writing you do in one day? Don’t overlook these seven daily writing tasks!
According to Lifewire.com, people around the world send more than two billion emails per day. That’s 2.4 million emails every second! The format of some emails closely resembles that of physical letters. For example, business emails contain the salutation, body, and closing that you would find in a business letter.
