All of a sudden is an idiom that is a more poetic way of saying “suddenly.” A common mistake to make, especially for English learners, is to write all the sudden or all of the sudden. On a sudden is a historic but outmoded variant. Currently, all of a sudden is the only accepted usage.
Although all of the sudden has been used in centuries past, all of a sudden is the phrasing that eventually stuck.
Don’t feel bad if you mix up use to and used to now and again—it is not an uncommon mistake. Used to is a phrase that can mean “accustomed or habituated to” or refers to something from the past that is no longer true. Use to and used to are also frequently used in English grammar as modal verb phrases.
Before we get into idiomatic meanings for the phrase used to, it is worth pointing out that both use and used can correctly appear before to when to is part of the infinitive of a second verb.
If a word ends in ‑s, ‑sh, ‑ch, ‑x, or ‑z, you add ‑es. For almost all other nouns, add -s to pluralize.
When do you add ‑s and when do you add ‑es to make a plural noun? It’s not quite as arbitrary as it may seem.
If a word ends in ‑s, ‑sh, ‑ch, ‑x, or ‑z, you add ‑es. Consider the examples below:
I had to take only one bus; you had to take two buses.
There are 1 million links shared, 2 million friends requested, and 3 million messages sent on Facebook every 20 minutes. Twitter users send 9,100 tweets every second. More than 60 percent of all Americans have at least one social media profile — and many use this profile daily. Whether you love it or hate it, communication on social media is a fact of life.
Unfortunately, the nuances of communicating on social media escape many people.
“We live in a content-saturated world,” your editor shrugs. Your coffee has suddenly gone cold, and so has the conversation.
What she means is that the commodity you’re offering – your writing – is hard to sell, because the web has made written words more readily available than ever. Honing a voice that stands out can feel like an impossible gig to take to the bank – which is where, if you’d listened to your parents, you’d be working, instead of haunting cafes and coffee shops with your laptop, trying to grind out a living as a writer.
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.
Deciding whether to put a comma before or after but in a sentence is hard for a lot of writers, but it doesn’t have to be for you!
You should put a comma before but only when but is connecting two independent clauses.
How do you know you have two independent clauses? First, look at the words before but: I would go for a walk.
