The difference between the verbs lay and lie is one of English’s most confusing questions. Both words involve something or someone in a horizontal position, but where the two words differ has to do with who or what is horizontal—the subject of the verb (the one doing the action) or the direct object (the person or thing being acted upon). In this article, we’ll break …
Take a look at the following sentences: I am the greatest. Everybody loves me almost as much as I love myself. While we can’t say much for this writer’s humility, we do know, however, that this person knows how to use pronouns. And not just any pronouns. The pronouns they use are based on a first person point of view: they are describing the world …
Nouns refer to the many people, places, and things around us. There are many different types of nouns that we use when talking about everything we see or experience. Sometimes, we are talking about one thing. For example, you may have only one pet, one sister, one house, one last slice of pizza, or one idea for a funny knock-knock joke. One is the loneliest number, …
We’re going to go out on a limb and guess that your online writing and casual conversations don’t follow every single grammar rule. (In fact, do your text messages or Instagram comments follow any rules at all?) And that’s OK, because the way you speak with your friends or communicate online is not meant to sound quite as formal as, say, an essay or published …
The children were asleep. Their parents were asleep. Their dogs were asleep. These sentences work fine separately but seem a little repetitive, don’t you think? Instead, let’s use a conjunction to connect them together. The children, their parents, and their dogs were asleep. That looks a lot better, right? Conjunctions are very useful words that connect parts of speech together to form more complex sentences. …
Prepositions are a major part of grammar that allow us to write fun, complicated sentences. For example, a preposition can take a boring sentence like We ran and turn it into We ran to the enchanted castle in the pixie forest. Prepositions show up in many of our sentences and some of the most commonly used English words are prepositions. (And yes, we’ve just used …
Commas can separate items in a list—for most of us this is a grade-school lesson. However, there’s one comma use that tends to complicate the issue even beyond our recess and lunch box years: the Oxford comma. What is the Oxford comma? In a list of three or more items, the last comma is called the Oxford comma (or the serial comma). For example, in …
During an average day, you probably see a lot of interesting things. While walking down the street, you might see a dozen cars drive by, some people on the sidewalk, or flocks of birds flying overhead. If you’ve studied your grammar, you probably know that cars, people, flocks, and birds are all nouns. While there are many types of nouns, all three of these particular nouns …
Verbs are an important part of English as they are the only parts of speech that can perform the job of a predicate of a sentence. When we think of verbs, we usually think of single words like walk, eat, go, or give. However, verbs can get a lot fancier than that. For example, we could mash two words together to create verbs like overestimate …
Of the different types of brackets, most people would likely say that parentheses are the ones they know the best. Going further, some people may not even know that there are other types of brackets. While square brackets may not be used very often, they are often crucial to writers who are wrangling an especially difficult quote. You never know when this poor writer might …
These days, social media is glut with excited folks who are sending off their cheek swabs to find out just what’s hiding in their DNA. Will they find out they had an ancestor on the Mayflower? Or, maybe they have a Native American ancestor? That would make them Native American too, right? Well, the definition of Native American is a lot more complicated than the …
Did you know that pronouns love to gossip? It is true! There is nothing they like more than joining us to talk about other people. In particular, pronouns that are focused on the third-person point of view can’t stop themselves from talking about everything and everyone. Did you hear what she said? What was he doing? Why are they here? Well, why don’t we give …