Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Famous Friendships in Children’s Literature

Everyone knows you can’t get good at grammar without friendship. Children’s literature has some great models of friendship at its finest.

In growing-up order, here are five such examples of best friends through the ages.

Frog and Toad

“We will skip through the meadows and run through the woods and swim in the river. In the evenings we will sit right here on this front porch and count the stars.”

Monday, January 13, 2014

How Gaming Makes You a Better (Yes, Better) Communicator

The stereotype of gamers as abysmal communicators is familiar.

It’s easy to picture an anti-social type sitting alone in his unkempt room with the blinds drawn, swilling energy drinks and grinding levels past dawn. Or worse yet, the kind who racks up kills online while wearing a headset and emitting a nonstop stream of cringeworthy recriminations. There is also that timeworn trope of the dungeon crawlers—those chortling weird-beards in the back room of the comic shop, forever rolling dice of peculiar geometries and blurting shrill inanities about critical fumbles: “This is preposterous!”

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Empower Your Writing: Transform the Passive Voice

Tell a writer that he should avoid the passive voice in writing, and he’ll usually agree – although the passive voice is perfectly acceptable grammatically.

Most writers know that the sentence, “The cow jumped over the moon” is better than “The moon was jumped over by the cow.” However, if you check a few documents with Grammarly’s Add-in for Microsoft Office Suite, you’ll see that this ghost continues to haunt.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

5 Must-Visit Museums for Literature Lovers

May 18 is International Museum Day. Some of the world’s greatest treasures and most valuable art are housed in museums, but you can also find smaller museums that cater to nearly every taste and interest. Here are five museums literature lovers might want to visit:

Monroe County Museum in Alabama

Located just down the street from the childhood home of Harper Lee, the author of the famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the Monroe County Museum is the home of the famous courtroom in which part of the novel was set.

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Strategies to Deal With Chronic Interrupters

Getting interrupted is no fun. Whether it’s at work or with a friend or family member, being the interruptee can make you feel disrespected and unheard. The good news: there are strategies for dealing with interrupters.

First, approach the situation differently based on the context and kind of interrupting. Here are some examples:

  • You’re giving a presentation and your boss interrupts with a question
  • You’re in a brainstorm session and a colleague interrupts your idea with a different idea
  • In a chat with a friend, he or she keeps interrupting to give advice, or change the subject
  • In an argument with a significant other, you both interrupt each other to make your point
  • In a panel on gender and diversity and business, a male executive repeatedly interrupts a female executive (and doesn’t seem to notice until someone calls him out)
  • In an award ceremony, Kanye West interrupts Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech to say Beyoncé made a better video than Tay Tay.

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Technology That Can Help You Write Better

Writing is a creative and magical process. There’s no telling when inspiration will strike—or what unique conditions will help us access our creativity.

Over the centuries, writers have discovered what worked best for them—no matter how unusual. Agatha Christie penned her murder mysteries in the bathtub while eating apples and drinking tea. Gertrude Stein was known for writing on the go, sitting in her Model T with a pencil and notepad while her wife drove her around running errands.

Thursday, December 26, 2013

How to Customize Your Writing in Job Applications

Writing job applications is a necessary evil that awaits most of us. On the plus side, applications allow us to reach for the stars—or at least for employers we would never be able to reach through recommendations or word of mouth. On the flip side, they offer the same opportunity to hundreds of other people who are also looking for a job. To make matters even worse, in this day and age you can’t use the same résumé and cover letter for every job post you see.