What Were the Most Common Email Mistakes of 2017?

How’s your email game? Are people happy to correspond with you, or are they leaving you hanging?

The quality of your email communication can significantly impact how you’re perceived by others (especially in business). And though we all do our best to write like a boss, grammatical errors still creep in.

Fortunately we can learn from our own (and others’) mistakes. So as the year wraps up, let’s take a moment to reflect on the fifteen most common email mistakes made by Grammarly users in 2017 and find out what we can all do to step up our email game in 2018.

11 Tips to Clean Up Your Dirty, Wordy Writing

Get out the pruning shears: a big part of good writing is good editing. And a surefire way to give your writing a confidence boost is to eliminate words that weigh down your writing and make you sound uncertain.

We call these weasel words. Like weasels, they’re not necessarily bad on their own. In fact, they’re kind of cute. But weasels are known for escaping situations (ever heard of someone “weaseling out” of something?).

11 Words and Phrases to Use in Salary Negotiations if You Want to Succeed

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a magic word you could say in order to get people to agree with you? If, for example, a simple utterance of “abracadabra” could instantly convince your employer to see things your way, salary negotiations would be a whole lot easier.

Unfortunately, we live in the real world, and those magic words that guarantee instant success don’t quite exist — but the good news is, we’ve got the next best thing.

13 Professional Writers to Follow on Facebook

After a delightful meal, have you ever sent your compliments to the chef? Finishing a great novel can leave you with the same urge to congratulate the brilliant mind behind it. Did you know you can leave a message for your favorite author on Facebook? Besides messages, Facebook offers you the opportunity to discover a lot about your favorite writer. Let’s look at the pages of thirteen professional writers!

Compound Words

When two words are used together to yield a new meaning, a compound is formed. Compound words can be written in three ways: as open compounds (spelled as two words, e.g., ice cream), closed compounds (joined to form a single word, e.g., doorknob), or hyphenated compounds (two words joined by a hyphen, e.g., long-term). Sometimes, more than two words can form a compound (e.g., mother-in-law).

Grammar Basics: What Are Antecedents?

When a pronoun replaces a noun, the noun is called an antecedent.

On Michael’s first day of work, he was a little nervous.

Michael is the antecedent and he is the pronoun. The antecedent doesn’t have to go before the pronoun, but putting the pronoun first can make long or complex sentences harder to follow.

On his first day of work, Michael was a little nervous.

How Do Creative People Overcome Imposter Syndrome?

Last night, I performed at a local open mike. I’ve been singing forever. Performing was even a legitimate side hustle for me for about seventeen years. But at the open mike, I was sitting at the piano in front of a group of talented fellow musicians, and I was nervous as hell.

Even so, I got up there under the lights, sat down at the piano, and surrendered to the music. When I stepped from the stage, the musicians and guests gathered in the little performance space murmured their approval, letting me know they thought my singing and playing had been solid.