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.
The Oxford (or serial) comma is the final comma in a list of things. For example:
The Oxford comma comes right after eraser.
Use of the Oxford comma is stylistic, meaning that some style guides demand its use while others don’t. AP Style—the style guide that newspaper reporters adhere to—does not require the use of the Oxford comma.
Whether or not you put a comma before and depends on how you’re using and. There’s no single rule that applies to all situations. You usually put a comma before and when it’s connecting two independent clauses. It’s almost always optional to put a comma before and in a list.
A lot of people have strong feelings about putting a comma before and in a list. Exactly why this particular quirk of comma usage stirs such passions is hard to say; it’s just one of those things.
Should you use a comma before or? The answer depends on how you are using or. Always place a comma before or when it begins an independent clause, but if it begins a dependent clause, don’t. In a series (or list) of three or more items, you can use a comma before or, but this is a preference, not a rule.
People often get muddled about whether to place a comma before conjunctions like and, so, because, and or.
We all make mistakes. Sometimes, we even embrace them.
Such is the case with language. The words you’re reading right now are the product of centuries of slang, corruption, amalgamation, and lazy habits. The writers of today gently nudge future evolutions of English by choosing which mistakes will be acceptable tomorrow. (For instance, where you use verbs like “stung” and “stunk,” experts believe future writers may instead opt for “stinged” and “stinked.”)
Any way you slice it, 2016 has been a tough year.
We lost beloved novelists like Harper Lee and Gloria Naylor; lyricists like David Bowie, Prince, and Leonard Cohen; and book-character-embodying actors like Alan Rickman and Gene Wilder.
We expressed a dip in mood in our writing online. One study by social media analytics company Crimson Hexagon showed that popular retail holidays like Black Friday experienced a rise in negative sentiment in 2016, despite rosy predictions.
We’ve hit the fifth day of LitMas, and we’re still going strong! If you’ve missed any of our previous LitMas gifts, here’s a quick summary:
On the fifth day of LitMas, Grammarly gave to (you) . . . Five golden gags, Four reading tips. Three French phrases, Two Christmas stories, And a poem that is wintery.
For our fifth installment, here are five games, jokes, and memes you can use at your office holiday party.
There are two types of writers in this world: those who use too many commas and those who use too few. While unnecessary commas can turn straightforward sentences into twisting labyrinths of syntactical confusion, missing a critical comma can change the entire meaning of your sentence.
Consider the headline from the now-infamous Rachael Ray cover of Tails magazine: “Rachael Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.” While the line breaks of the original cover make it apparent what the editors meant to say, the lack of commas between the three items in the list—“cooking,” “family,” and “her dog”—caused Tails to accidentally portray Ray as a cannibal who gleefully cooks her family and dog.
Martha Brockenbrough is the founder of National Grammar Day and author of The Game of Love and Death, which comes out April 28 and has received starred reviews from Kirkus Books and Publishers Weekly. Martha recently spoke with the Grammarly team to provide some insight into National Grammar Day and to share her perspective on language.
Grammarly: You established National Grammar Day in 2008.
