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.
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.
The passive voice is a misunderstood entity in the world of writing. It is unfairly judged by many authors. Some writers, without taking the time to get to know this grammatical structure, avoid it at all costs. Others use it ineffectively because they do not understand how it works. How can you get to know this mysterious literary device?
First, let’s start with an explanation of what passive voice is.
Why is it so easy to confuse less and fewer? Perhaps because they both represent the opposite of the comparative adjective more. Luckily, the conundrum of less vs. fewer has a solution that is simple to remember. It involves deducing whether fewer or less will be working with a countable or uncountable noun in your intended sentence.
In English, we use the same word, more, for a greater number and a greater amount/quantity.
The phrase as well as creates one of those situations where you may have to make a judgment call about comma usage. As a general rule, you don’t need a comma before as well as.
As well as means “in addition to.”
The sentence above means that you should proofread for both spelling and grammatical errors.
If you’ve ever fantasized about wielding a red pencil that could correct grammatical mistakes in the text messages you receive, you’re in for a treat. There’s a new app on iTunes called Grammar Snob, and it gives you the ability to correct grammatical mistakes in texts. All you need to do is download it, wait until you receive a text message containing one of the mistakes covered by the app, place a corresponding sticker over the mistake, and hit send.
In between should always appear as two words. Although inbetween is common, it is a misspelling and does not appear in any English dictionary. Unnecessarily adding in to between is also a common grammatical mistake. As a compound adjective, in-between should be hyphenated.
When we speak, we often add in before between when it isn’t needed.
What’s the difference between despite and in spite of?
The easy answer: none. Despite and in spite of, despite what you may have heard, work identically in a sentence.
In other words, these two prepositions, in spite of what you may have heard, are basically identical.
In most cases, both mean “notwithstanding,” “even though,” or “regardless of.”
Despite their similarities, keep these things in mind to make sure your usage gives no cause for complaint.
Gravestones are meant to live on long after the person they represent has passed. It’s important to make sure they’re both well-deserved celebrations of life and completely accurate, since correcting these stones can be an arduous and expensive process. In honor of “Plan Your Epitaph Day,” which took place yesterday, here are six famous examples of epitaphs with grave spelling or grammatical errors.
In mathematical language, a transformation changes a form without changing its value. If that doesn’t mean much to you, let Sal explain it to you in a short video complete with examples and diagrams. Salman (Sal) Khan is the founder of Khan Academy, an online academy that offers math, science, art, and other courses free of charge. Though there are no English grammar classes yet, students seeking to sharpen their skills can still benefit from the academy’s offerings.
