Unlike spelling, grammar (however you define it) has few rules that apply to one hundred percent of situations. However, formal situations often require that you conform to certain stylistic and grammatical guidelines. Often, these guidelines are in place to make writing clearer or less clunky. This post and the two …
Your surroundings can have a more powerful effect on your mindset and behavior than you realize. The way you use your workspace can boost your creativity by taking advantage of your senses, removing your excuses, and even hacking your brain. Use Your Senses Make blue a major part of your …
When you think of Vikings, what pops into your mind is probably a vague notion of the olden days – fierce conquerors sailing around northern Europe and wearing horned helmets. Well, the horned helmets most likely never existed (sorry!), but there are still plenty of Norse influences around today. Norse …
English grammar rules are weird. Many things that would have been considered “ungrammatical” in the past are now perfectly acceptable – to the point where you may never have thought twice about using them. Here are six former English grammar rules. At a certain point, people broke these rules so …
If you’re a hare’s breath away from meeting the goal, then for all intensive purposes we’ll say you’ve met it. Some people would just be overjoyed to hear their bosses make this comment. Others might have to contain their amusement (or annoyance) at the eggcorns. What are eggcorns? Well, in …
Words’ meanings shift over time. This doesn’t happen because a high priest of English decide that it’s time for a change. It happens because the way people use words is always evolving. Once enough people have begun using a word to mean a certain thing, the word, by definition, means …
Alright, picture this. You’re sitting at your desk. Your hands hover unmoving over your keyboard. You’re composing an email, but you can’t seem to get past the subject line, and all that’s staring back at you is a big, empty white box.Hey, don’t sweat it, friend. We’ve all been there.You’ve …
Parallelism may sound fancy, but on a basic level, it’s just the use of grammatically similar constructions for all items in a series. Sentences that follow the rules of parallelism are typically considered more logical and easier to read. Here is a sentence that lacks parallelism: Emus like eating bugs, …
If your knot concentrating, a common affect is that its to easy too right a sentence like this won. Read that sentence out loud. It sounds perfectly fine. But on the page, it’s pretty messed up. (Did you catch all the errors? There are eight.) This is because it’s full …
“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.” – Raymond Chandler While this quotation is perhaps a bit graphic, it captures a truth about the writing process. Writing – the process of drafting – involves the production of the verbal version of vomit: a large amount of …
