7 Writing Tips That Will Help You at Work

Let’s get the bad news over with first: no matter how much you write, it will probably never become the kind of mindlessly automatic task for which you’re fully free to zone out.

In other words, writing steadily for an afternoon will never be as meditative as a long drive down an empty highway. You have to keep filling the progress bar yourself. Seated at the keyboard, every moment a writer spends mentally compiling a grocery list or critiquing the coffee shop’s playlist is a moment that zero writing is done.

What is the official language of the U.S.?

This poll is part of a series that Grammarly is running aimed at better understanding how the public feels about writing, language learning, and grammar.

Please take the poll and share your thoughts in the comments. We can’t wait to hear from you!

If you are interested in more, check out last week’s poll.

Conditional Verbs

Conditional verbs are used to create conditional sentences, which express hypothetical or unlikely situations. Conditional verbs can be used in the past, present, or future tense, and auxiliary verbs like can/could, will/would, and may/might are important in forming conditionals.

Consider the following conditional sentences, and pay close attention to the conditional verbs in each of them:

#GrammarDay Celebrity Personality Quiz: Is Your Grammar Like a Pop Star or a Comedian?

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Are you curious how all the celebrities did? Learn more about our #GrammarDay MVPs in our recent study.

9 Things You Need to Give up to Be a Successful Writer

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 and Uncountable Nouns: Rules and Examples

Countable Nouns

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:

Here is a cat.

Cat is singular and countable.

How to Spell 40: Forty or Fourty?

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: