This Week in Writing, 8/29-9/4

Happy Friday! Once again it’s time for our weekly roundup of stories about writing, books, and authors. Have something you’d like to see us cover here? Let us know in the comment section!

Our Favorite Stories:

1 Tips for Aspiring Writers in 12 Infographics (Ebook Friendly)

2 Writing Tips from a Supreme Court Justice (Time)

3 J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Trivia Tweets (Salon)

4 Good Grammar Can Keep You Out of Trouble (Grammarly)

What Is a Protagonist?

• Protagonist comes from a Greek word for the principal actor in a drama.
• In modern literature, the protagonist drives the story forward by pursuing a goal.
• The protagonist of a story is sometimes called the main character.
• The protagonist of a story is opposed by an antagonist.

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If you have ever taken a writing or literature class, you probably heard someone refer to a protagonist.

Celebrities on Twitter: Who makes more mistakes?

Grammarly recently compiled a list of the 25 most recent tweets from each of the top 150+ celebrities on Twitter, based on number of followers. Our team of proofreaders then corrected these tweets for spelling and grammar errors. Here’s a general overview of what we found:

• Female celebrities make fewer overall writing errors (11.1 mistakes per 100 words) than male celebrities (13.0 mistakes per 100 words) on Twitter
• Musicians are the worst writers in any category of celebrity, including politician, actor, athlete, and business leader, with an average of 14.5 mistakes per 100 words.

Thrusted? The Past Tense of Thrust

• Thrust is the standard past tense form of the verb thrust.
• Thrusted exists, but it is rare.

Have you ever flown in an airplane? Thrust is one of the things that makes the aircraft move in the sky. According to HowStuffWorkst, thrust is “the aerodynamic force that pushes or pulls the airplane forward through space.” Planes use jet engines or propellers to create thrust. Why the lesson in aerodynamics?

Top Student Writing Mistakes: The Real “Madness” in Higher Education

According to some estimates, March Madness costs companies up to $134 million in lost productivity — with employees streaming the tournament online, updating brackets, participating in office pools, and more.

Imagine if the United States cared as much about the quality of a school’s curriculum as we do about the caliber of its basketball team?

In keeping with the competitive spirit of the NCAA basketball championship, the Grammarly team created a “tournament” of our own.

Are gender-neutral pronouns the wave of the future?

The reader must understand that they are at the mercy of the author’s imagination.

What’s wrong with the sentence above? Some might say there is nothing at all is wrong with it. Others, however, will take issue with the use of ‘they,’ a plural pronoun, in place of the singular ‘reader.’ How can this sentence be corrected? Some would use ‘he’ in place of ‘they,’ with the understanding that masculine pronouns are a stand-in for proper nouns of either gender.

The Declaration of Independence: A Lesson in Language History

Language is constantly evolving – a fact made especially clear when we take a look at historical documents and note how writing norms have shifted over the years. The further back we go, the bigger the shift. The Declaration of Independence, for example, represents a version of English that is noticeably different than that which we use to communicate today.

What are the main grammatical differences between Thomas Jefferson’s version of English and our own?