Writers on the State of Professional Writing

“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.

How Helpful Was Your Grammar and Writing Education?

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.

Comma Before But

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!

When Do You Need a Comma Before But?

You should put a comma before but only when but is connecting two independent clauses.

I would go for a walk, but it’s raining outside.

How do you know you have two independent clauses? First, look at the words before but: I would go for a walk.

The Importance of Providing Books in High Poverty Classrooms

Guest post by Debra Hannula, J. D. Bookmentors.org

As the daughter of two retired public school teachers and an attorney for thirty years working on behalf of and representing the poor, the lack of proper books in high poverty schools is an issue that is near and dear to me.

Research shows that the amount of books students read affects their reading levels and their ability to perform well on standardized tests.

Sentence Fragments

Sentence fragments are snippets of words that don’t quite add up to a complete thought. There are several common types of sentence fragments, including:

• Subordinate clause fragments
• Participial phrase fragments
• Infinitive phrase fragments

Let’s take a look at each of them.

To understand sentence fragments, we must first know what a complete sentence looks like. In its most basic form, a sentence consists of a subject (a noun) and a predicate (a verb).

Verb Conjugation–Grammar Rules

Verb conjugation refers to how a verb changes to show a different person, tense, number or mood.

Person:

In English, we have six different persons: first person singular (I), second person singular (you), third person singular (he/she/it/one), first person plural (we), second person plural (you), and third person plural (they). We must conjugate a verb for each person. The verb to be is a particularly notable verb for conjugation because it’s irregular.

Celebrate Social Media Day with These 5 Tips

Happy World Social Media Day!

It’s no secret that we love social media. And as Grammarly’s Social Media Manager, I’ve devoted most of my professional life to figuring out what the cool kids are doing online. And today, I’m here to help you do the same. Let’s dive into all the things you should (and shouldn’t) be doing on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter.

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1Write, Reread, Ponder, Then Post

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