Ah, the holidays! The winter festivities mean that many of us get to leave the stress of office life behind. If you’re taking an extended break, you may want to create a holiday out-of-office message to let your contacts know you’ll get back to them just as soon as the eggnog is out of your system and you’ve returned to your desk.
Within reason, it’s okay to have some fun with your out-of-office message.
Parentheses are punctuation marks that are used to set off information within a text or paragraph. Outside the realm of emoticons, parentheses always come in pairs. They can enclose a single word, a phrase, or even an entire sentence. Typically, the words inside the parentheses provide extra information about something else in the sentence.
Let’s use this example to understand what a simile is:
An infinitive is a simple verb combined with ‘to.’ For example: to sleep, to run, to fly, to hide
Remember this formula: Infinitive = to + verb
Infinitives can function as subjects, objects, adjectives, and adverbs. For example:
To wait for an answer seemed like a waste of time. (To wait is the subject of the sentence.)
I can’t stand it; I refuse to look. (To look is the direct object of the sentence.)
A dash is a little horizontal line that floats in the middle of a line of text (not at the bottom: that’s an underscore). It’s longer than a hyphen and is commonly used to indicate a range or a pause. Dashes are used to separate groups of words, not to separate parts of words like a hyphen does. There are three forms of dashes: em, en, and the double hyphen.
The most common types of dashes are the en dash (–) and the em dash (—).
A contraction is a shortened form of a word (or group of words) that omits certain letters or sounds. In most contractions, an apostrophe represents the missing letters. The most common contractions are made up of verbs, auxiliaries, or modals attached to other words: He would=He’d. I have=I’ve. They are=They’re. You cannot=You can’t.
Contractions are common in speech—so common that we don’t always take the time to pronounce them precisely, which leads to a particular contraction mistake writers might make if they’re not paying attention.
Job searching is like dating: each side involved is trying to find the perfect fit. You’re sizing up an employer to see if they’ve got what it takes to make you happy. The employer is evaluating whether you can make their dreams come true as a productive, successful team member.
However, much like dating, there are some behaviors that can be a turn-off. No, we’re not talking about things like mansplaining at the dinner table or endlessly sharing stories about an ex.
