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.
“Vampires! Zombies! Werewolves!” “Where?!” “Behind you!”
For a while now, we’ve been working on improvements for Grammarly Insights based on your feedback. But until recently, this was an undercover job.
So, it’s with great jubilation that we reveal some big changes making their way to your inbox next week.
1 Monitor Your Trends
Until now, the weekly emails summarized your activity over the previous seven days. Moving forward, we will graph up to four weeks’ worth of progress in the Productivity, Mastery, and Vocabulary sections.
You’ve worked to make your email clear, and you’ve carefully edited to streamline your writing. The body of your email might well be perfect, but it can all go awry if you use the wrong sign-off. It’s just a word or a short phrase, followed by your signature, and yet finding the right tone to close your email often requires a surprising amount of thought and finesse.
When you’re struggling with how to end an email, it’s best to consider the context.
A prepositional phrase is a group of words consisting of a preposition, its object, and any words that modify the object. Most of the time, a prepositional phrase modifies a verb or a noun. These two kinds of prepositional phrases are called adverbial phrases and adjectival phrases, respectively.
At a minimum, a prepositional phrase consists of one preposition and the object it governs.
When you’re in a hurry, you might write “it’s” when you really mean “its,” or the other way around. You need to be aware of this mistake and know when to use which.
It’s is a contraction of “it is” or “it has.” Its is a possessive determiner we use to say that something belongs to or refers to something.
It’s and its are among the most commonly confused words. They are pronounced the same, there’s a very small difference in how they’re written, and it’s also easy to mistake the contraction in it’s for a possessive.
Have you ever noticed how, in the English language, some small words sometimes appear in a lot of bigger words? Take the word “friend,” for example. If you notice someone who is acting friendly toward you, you might want to start a friendship, so you befriend her. You don’t want to be friendless, after all, but you also probably don’t want to befriend unfriendly people, so you save your friendliness for those who really deserve it.
Many of the most commonly used nouns have irregular conjugations in the past simple and perfect forms. “To be” is one of these. Learn more about perfect forms.
To learn more about grammar and to help us celebrate National Grammar Day this March, visit our new resource page.
A common error is to confuse into, spelled as one word, with the two words in to. When deciding which is right for your sentence, remember that into is a preposition that shows what something is within or inside. As separate words, in and to sometimes simply wind up next to each other.
A preposition is a word that shows a relationship, usually in terms of space or time, between words in a clause or phrase.
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re either a writer or a person who frequently comes into contact with the written word. You might be a journalist who writes articles, a blogger who writes blog posts, a student who writes term papers, or an activist who writes grant proposals. As long as your life includes at least an occasional putting of a pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, you know how important it is to proofread everything you write.
Adjectives are descriptive words that modify (describe) nouns (persons, places, things, or ideas). They often tell you how many, which, and what kind. For example:
“He baked a delicious, beautiful cake.” (What kind of cake is it? It is delicious and beautiful.) “Nine members of our group signed up for the yoga class.” (How many members signed up? Nine.) “Hand me the broken radio so I can try to fix it.” (Which radio?
