Workplace stress touches most of us at one time or another. In fact, according to the American Institute of Stress, 80 percent of us feel stressed at work. Deadlines loom. Bosses make unrealistic demands. Restructuring means anxiety over job security. Although stressors may be an inherent part of work life, buckling under the pressure doesn’t have to be.
There are plenty of reasons to manage your workplace stress rather than accepting it as part and parcel of having a busy career.
Some types of jerk behavior are obvious. Calling names. Laughing at someone’s ideas. Stealing a coworker’s lunch out of the office refrigerator (come on, are you an animal?).
But it’s also possible to be a jerk by accident, especially in writing. Have you ever found yourself worrying that your two-sentence email will sound cold to the person on the other end? Or are you just now realizing that’s something you should worry about? (You should—warmth may be even more important than competence when it comes to establishing business relationships.)
Grammar gets a bad rap even without the help of the vigilantes who use it to take the moral high ground. So when a few haters decide to reduce learners, those who make grammatical mistakes, and even old-school grammar pedants to lifeless sea scum, it doesn’t do grammar any favors. It only means true and noble grammarians need to work harder to destigmatize the institution. So, if you truly adore the conventions that structure and shed light on the English language, give some thought to what we think are the guiding principles to a society where everyone understands each other easily and clearly.
Like an unkeyboardinated tween, you can count on language for boundless creativity – and a seeming randomness that’s hard to keep up with.
We’re constantly adding new words and devising new forms and quirky mashups of old ones. But whether you’re squishing two existing words together to create a new one, or perhaps repurposing a familiar pronoun to be more inclusive, many of the ways we tinker with language follow a few well-worn patterns.
Can you spot the gerund in the sentence “Learning about gerunds is fun”? No, the answer isn’t gerunds. It’s learning.
To understand gerunds, (pronounced JER-undz, by the way) it helps to understand the difference between a word’s grammatical form and its grammatical function in a sentence.
Take the word dancing. Dancing is the present participle of the verb to dance.
Do you have an interview coming up? You are probably preparing for it all wrong! Typical job candidates spend most of their time rehearsing answers. Instead, they should be looking for ways to evaluate their potential employer. Here’s how to use your job interview to find out if a job is right for you.
Harvard Business Review reported that, on average, workers change jobs once every three or four years.
Comedy lovers rejoice! After a six-year hiatus, Larry David’s acclaimed comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm is returning to HBO on October 1 for its much-anticipated ninth season.
Not familiar with the irascible Larry David? Larry got his start doing stand-up in the 1970s and was briefly a writer for SNL. But he’s best known as the true genius (and head writer and executive producer) behind the beloved ’90s sitcom Seinfeld, one of the most successful shows of all time.
