Written communication isn’t easy. If it was, there would be no misunderstandings on social media, and we would never have to go back and clarify something we’d written after the fact. But that’s not the world we live in.
The need to improve one’s writing skills isn’t reserved only for those who want to be published novelists or award-winning journalists—there are endless benefits to being able to communicate through the written word.
Countable nouns refer to items that can be counted, even if the number might be extraordinarily high (like counting all the people in the world, for example). Countable nouns can be used with articles such as a/an and the or quantifiers such as a few and many. Look at the sentence below and pay particular attention to the countable noun:
Cat is singular and countable.
40 (forty) is the number that follows 39 and precedes 41. Though it’s related to the number “four” (4), the modern spelling of 40 is “forty.” The older form, “fourty,” is treated as a misspelling today. The modern spelling could reflect a historical pronunciation change.
If you catch yourself misspelling the name of this number as fourty, you’re not alone. It’s a common mistake, both in print and online:
Are there certain phrases in English that you can never quite remember? Chances are, others have the same difficulty. Here are some of the most commonly confused expressions in English.
I couldn’t care less So you do care! That’s what you’ll be saying if you say what many others mistakenly do: I could care less.
By accident If you say this wrong, you might have learned it from a native speaker.
Sentences may contain many different types of clauses. Defining clauses, also called restrictive clauses, serve an important function. What role do they play in sentences and how does it relate to the name of these clauses?
First, let’s lay some groundwork. A subject, verb, and a relative pronoun (who, whose, where, when, which, or that) distinguish relative clauses from other types of clauses, though not all three are needed.
You are battling toward the nexus in a 5v5-ranked game late on a Wednesday night. You have to work the next day and know you are not going to get enough sleep. But fear not! Your dedication to League of Legends is helping more than just your online rep. It’s helping you to be a better team player by teaching you these five valuable lessons in communicating under pressure.
On the ninth day of LitMas . . .
. . . you get nine wonderful novellas!
Novellas tend to fly under the radar. Readers know what to expect from short stories, and they know what they’re getting into with novels, but novellas fall into an ill-defined space somewhere between short story and novel. Some people think of them simply as very short novels—others have more specific criteria.
