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.
Four Types of Book Editing
1. Developmental Editing
Any or all of the following:
- Working with the client and, usually, the author of a book or other document to develop a manuscript from initial concept, outline, or draft (or some combination of the three) through any number of subsequent drafts
- making suggestions about content, organization, and presentation, based on analysis of competing works, comments of expert reviewers, the client’s market analysis, and other appropriate references
- rewriting, writing, and researching, as needed, and sometimes suggesting topics or providing information about topics for consideration of authors and client.
2. Substantive Editing
Improving a manuscript in any or all of the following ways:
- identifying and solving problems of overall clarity or accuracy
- reorganizing paragraphs, sections, or chapters to improve the order in which the text is presented
- writing or rewriting segments of text to improve readability and flow of information
- revising any or all aspects of the text to improve its presentation
- consulting with others about issues of concern
- incorporating responses to queries and suggestions creating a new draft of the document
3. Copy Editing (sometimes called line editing).
Any or all of the following:
- correcting spelling, grammar, punctuation, syntax, and word usage while preserving the meaning and voice of the original text
- checking for or imposing a consistent style and format
- preparing a style sheet that documents style and format
- reading for overall clarity and sense on behalf of the prospective audience
- querying the appropriate party about apparent errors or inconsistencies
- noting permissions needed to publish copyrighted material
- preparing a manuscript for the next stage of the publication process
- cross-checking references, art, figures, tables, equations, and other features for consistency with their mentions in the text
4. Proofreading. Comparing the latest stage of text with the preceding stage, marking discrepancies in text, and, when appropriate, checking for problems in page makeup, layout, color separation, or type.
Proofreading may also include one or more of the following:
- checking proof against typesetting specifications
- querying or correcting errors or inconsistencies that may have escaped an editor or writer
- reading for typographical errors or for sense without reading against copy
Definitions from Freelance Editorial Association
From Writers Write
“Actually, it’s fewer.”
As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I wanted to take them back. An acquaintance had just made the dreaded less-fewer slipup in casual conversation, and I had begun to correct him before I realized two things: I didn’t know this person well enough to correct his grammar in an email, let alone in a quip uttered on a Friday night. My correction could easily come off as patronizing advice, or worse, a jab at his intelligence.
I thought about this incident while watching The Guardian’s latest video on the reasons why grammar snobs are the worst, knowing that I wasn’t alone in my pedantry. A whole culture of correction and condescension to those who don’t know grammar rules has taken root on social media, and I have occasionally taken part in it.
I agree wholeheartedly with the video’s first point, that grammar snobs often use outdated rules and guidelines to fuel their trolling. I also would concede that many of these rules are not only impractical but also exclusionary—as in the case of the singular “they.” Language is as much a living, breathing organism as the populations that speak it, so we shouldn’t be mired in tradition when cultural shifts call for new usages, terms, and rules. It’s time to let grammar live.
Also, I’ve realized that public grammar callouts are rarely productive, especially when they target individuals who may not have learned standard English grammar rules in the first place. According to a recent Grammarly poll, only 59 percent of respondents learned grammar in school. The other 41 percent relied on friends, family, or other sources to absorb grammar rules. We don’t generally point out other knowledge gaps in our peers unless they cause real-world problems. For example, imagine an American publicly correcting a friend every time she said she was going to “vote for the president.” That person could (rightly) say, “Well, technically, we’re not a direct democracy, so you don’t vote for the president. Your vote counts toward an electoral college vote, which you hope will go toward the candidate you support.” Although this is correct, most people wouldn’t engage in this level of correction in casual conversation, since it doesn’t fix a problem or further the discussion.
But what are grammar snobs and pedants left with when we can’t harp on the “whoms” and scoff at the “furthers”?
Occasionally, I think it’s still appropriate to correct the grammar of a larger group or body. For instance, organizations that are in positions of authority probably should promote standard English usage and clear language, so they don’t confuse their constituents. And, as we’ve seen time and time again, typos in official documents can cost millions to governments and corporations.
On an individual level, though, I agree with The Guardian, even if I am myself a recovering pedant and an occasional snob. Grammar snobbery is “just plain wrong.”
Watch the whole video here:
Your alarm fails to go off and you wake up twenty minutes late. You take a hasty shower, and for some reason the water temperature will only fluctuate between tepid and truly frigid. Despite those setbacks, you manage to grab a cup of coffee for the ride in, which you promptly spill down the front of your shirt. Then, when you arrive at the office you learn that your partner on a critical project has called in sick. Your deadline? Today. At noon.
You’re having an epically bad day. You could choose to wallow in it and be grumpy and miserable, but you (not to mention everyone around you) will be much happier if you can find a way to snap out of it. Science has answers!
Negative emotions and stress have physical effects. Our muscles tense. Our heart rate increases. Our breathing gets heavier or too shallow. You might not even notice these stress symptoms in the moment, but if you’ve ever gone home after a difficult day feeling achy and worn out, stress is likely the culprit.
Stop. Take a breath. In fact, take some measured breaths using the 4-7-8 technique, a practice often used in yoga and meditation. (The 4-7-8 technique is essentially a rebranding of pranayamic breathing.)
Find a quiet, comfortable place where you can be alone for a few minutes. Pay attention to your natural breathing for a while and allow yourself to get quiet. Let any distractions in your surroundings fall away. Then, breathe in for a steady count of four, hold the breath for a count of seven, and exhale slowly to a count of eight. Repeat this several times until you’re feeling relaxed.
When reality doesn’t match our expectations, we pour a lot of our energy into worrying that things should be different. But think about it—have you ever changed an outcome by simply wishing things were better?
via GIPHY
Acceptance is the key to happiness. When things go wrong, instead of resisting them, lean into them. Grab lunch with a colleague or friend and regale them with your tale of woe, all while having a good laugh at yourself. When you accept that annoying things happen to everyone, you can shrug them off and move on.
Do you mentally kick yourself when you’re having a bad day? Many of us do, and it can sound like this:
Ugh! I’m such an idiot.
This stuff always happens to me! What did I do to deserve this?
Why am I so lazy?
You wouldn’t call a friend who was having a rough day a lazy idiot, so why do it to yourself? Instead, practice positive self-talk. When you’re being overly self-critical, stop and reframe things. Be kind! You might refute the negative track playing in your head with positive statements like this:
I’m facing some challenges today, but I’m smart and resilient.
Bad days happen to everyone. I’ll bounce back.
I’m not feeling very motivated lately. I’ll brainstorm some ideas to get myself on track.
Keeping a journal is a fantastic way to destress. When things go wrong, we tend to ruminate on them. Mulling over unpleasant events can become a destructive cycle that’s hard to break. Our minds run a sort of instant replay on an endless loop without coming to any sort of resolution.
Journaling can help break the cycle of rumination, particularly if you focus on addressing topics that are causing you distress. Instead of hunting for a solution, ask yourself some questions designed to help you understand the issue. If there is a solution, the writing process may help you uncover it. If there isn’t, let journaling guide you toward acceptance.
Your emotional response to bad situations, like running late and spilling your coffee, triggers a reaction in the fight-or-flight part of your brain that causes stress. According to a UCLA study, putting a label on those emotions shifts your thought processing away from the amygdala to the area right behind your forehead and eyes (the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, if you want to get technical). This area of the brain is associated with putting emotional experiences into words.
When you put feelings into words, you’re activating this prefrontal region and seeing a reduced response in the amygdala. In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses.
—Matthew D. Lieberman, UCLA associate professor of psychology
So, the next time you spill your coffee down the front of your favorite shirt, just put a label on what you’re feeling.
Wow, I’m really angry about this. I’m ashamed to have people see me at work in a stained shirt.
Remember to use labels that represent real emotions. Words like “stressed” label an emotional response, not the emotion itself. Get to the root of the emotion causing the stress.
What is a day? It’s a twenty-four-hour cycle of daylight and darkness created by the earth turning on its axis. In reality, the only way to have a bad day would be if, say, the earth stopped spinning. That would be a cataclysmically bad day.
But the earth is still rotating, amigos! So, that bad day you’re having? It doesn’t exist in reality, only in your interpretation of it. And you can shape your own reality, so when you think about it, you have phenomenal cosmic power.
See? You’re pretty much crushing it. Now, go get ‘em!
Antidote vs. Anecdote Antidote: A remedy to counteract the effects of poison; something that counteracts or prevents something harmful. For example: We must find the antidote to the poison before its effects spread throughout the body. Her sense of humor is the perfect antidote to this stressful situation.
Anecdote: A short account of a real incident or person, often humorous or interesting; an account which supports an argument, but which is not supported by scientific or statistical analysis. For example: After explaining the philosophical concept, our professor shared an anecdote that explained its practical purpose. There are many anecdotes that support the use of tablets in schools.
Adverse vs. Averse Adverse: Unfavorable; antagonistic in purpose or effect; contrary to one’s welfare; acting against; opposed; contrary. It was difficult to accomplish anything in such adverse circumstances. Although the weekly meetings improved communication between team members, they had an adverse effect on productivity.
Averse: Having a repugnance or opposition of mind; having a strong dislike. She was completely averse to the idea of taking a family road trip. I typically don’t eat meat, but I’m not always averse to eating fish.
Believe it or not, the quality of your writing significantly influences some of the most important milestones in your life.
In school, good grammar helps students to achieve higher grades. On the job, professionals with fewer grammar errors tend to achieve higher positions; their writing is demonstrative of the credibility, professionalism, and accuracy observable in their work. And in your personal life, better spelling and grammar can even earn you a date!
In honor of National Grammar Day, the Grammarly team partnered with Redfin, the technology-powered real estate brokerage, to see if good grammar has an impact on other important life milestones – like buying a home. We surveyed nearly 1,300 people on our combined social media platforms, and here’s what we learned:
When researching a home for purchase, buyers prefer a “medium-sized” listing description. Somewhere around 50 words is the sweet spot. Beyond public opinion, Redfin looked deeper into listings across its platform and found that homes with descriptions of around 50 words are, indeed, more likely to sell within 90 days. What’s more, they also tend to sell for higher than list price.
The majority of survey respondents report that misspellings or improper grammar in a home listing matter “a lot.” As a matter of fact, 43.4 percent of survey respondents would be much less inclined to tour a home that features spelling or grammar errors prominently in the listing.
Redfin pointed out some examples of the spelling errors that have been known to haunt home listings in its blog post today, including:
Correctly spelled words used in the wrong context cause embarrassing mistakes. Luckily, Grammarly spots erroneous use of grime/crime, gem/germ, and many more commonly confused words (eg. lose/loose, affect/effect, lie/lay, there/their/they’re).
National Grammar Day is a great time each year to reflect on the ways that grammar truly touches your life and impacts your confidence, credibility, and success. At school, at home, or on the job, make sure that your grammar is something to write home about.
Happy National Grammar Day, friends!
Whether it’s a to-do list that never seems to get done, a less-than-inspired morning routine, or a tendency to get distracted (damn you, social media!), we’ve all got a hole in our productivity armor somewhere. Every Monday, we’re going to be analyzing common bad habits that could be holding you back, and we’ll offer a hack or two to help you get more quality output from your time. Our Monday Motivation Hacks will help get you into fighting shape and give you some new tactics to try out on the battlefield.
To kick off the series, let’s deal with to-do lists.
To-do lists are some of the most common, powerful, and versatile lists in the pantheon of lists. These simple lists usually focus on short-term tasks or goals, and as such they do quite a bit of heavy lifting day-to-day. However, without structure and prioritization, to-do lists easily mutate into rather useless behemoths.
While it is possible to organize a massive backlog after the fact, it is usually much more helpful to set up the framework of your to-do lists as you create them. Here are some helpful guidelines.
Often, a good to-do list comes from other to-do lists and similarly spawns more to-do lists. Before you get overwhelmed thinking about the seemingly infinite loop of list-making, keep in mind that what we’re really talking about here is the structure of your list organization—unless it’s super-short-term, they’re all nested.
For example, your weekly to-do list should inform your daily lists, and each daily list should inform the succeeding day’s list, which all informs future weeks’ lists. There can be as many “levels” to your system as necessary, but be sure it’s all prioritized.
Taking your to-do lists from useful to essential is more than just keeping them simple and having some kind of organization. Making to-do lists integral to your process depends on your ability to prioritize and break out tasks on the list. There are a few different ways you can mix and match to impose prioritized structure onto your lists.
The icing on the cake of to-do productivity is actually translating your super-prioritized and well-structured list into slots in your calendar. Literally, all you do it schedule time in your calendar to work on the items on your to-do list. This helps you to focus when you start working on a task and prevents others from scheduling meetings during your work time.
What to-do tips would you add?
If you want to up your list game beyond the simple to-do, learn which lists are best to use for achieving goals and take our quiz to see which list you need for your project.
The adverbs continuously and continually (and their corresponding adjectives, continuous and continual) are words that are confused easily and often. Continuously describes an action that happens without ceasing. Continually, on the other hand, describes an action that recurs frequently or regularly.
The confusion about whether to use continually or continuously is understandable, because both words share the same Latin root, continuare, meaning “to join together or connect.” Only the endings of the words are different, and over time, the two words have evolved with subtly distinct meanings.
The most common mistake people make when using these words is to ascribe an action with unintended frequency by using continuously where continually is more appropriate. This results in an exaggeration that will not escape the notice of an editor.
Does she? We all have relatives who can be exasperating at times, but is it possible for your grandmother to correct you continuously? Unless your grandmother is capable of delivering rapid-fire corrections at you with incessant, Terminator-like determination, continual is the word you need here.
Let’s try another example.
Talking is an action that is accomplished by human beings, and perhaps parrots. For both, it is almost impossible to do it continuously. I had an aunt who came close; she drew in big gasps between anecdotes so she could continue talking without getting light-headed. But unless a speaker’s “gift of the gab” can match my Aunt Kay’s, chances are they will occasionally pause for breath and await your responses.
If your aim is to underscore the fact that a speaker talked for a period of time in the broader sense before a large-scale interruption occurred, that can merit the word continuously.
It is quite easy to decide whether to use continuously or continually if you remember to ask yourself, “Did the action ever stop?” Some things do happen continuously and others simply don’t. A clock can tick continuously, and a heart can beat continuously. These actions are automatic. But can lightning strike continuously, for example?
Not only would that be frightening, it would be apocalyptic. You would awaken to a charred landscape that would be quite sobering to behold. Luckily, Mother Nature doesn’t assault us with continuous lightning. On a stormy night, however, it could be continual; that is, it could be happening often and regularly.
Continuously may work best when you are writing about a phenomenon that persists over a long period of time in an anthropological, historical, or geological sense. Take this sentence, for example:
The concept here is that buildings that never lapse into disuse are repaired and generally given the attention due to them. While it is not incorrect to say that the Pantheon was used continually (i.e., frequently, in the sense of “it’s amazing how Rome never sleeps”) over the last two thousand or so years, the fact that its use was never interrupted by a period of disuse needs to be highlighted.
Now that you have untangled continuously and continually, you might want to read about other commonly confused English words.
The job hunting process can be long and stressful. You’ve crafted the perfect resume, sent out countless cover letters, and now you’ve finally heard back that you’ve got a phone interview. This should be a walk in the park, right? An obligatory step to confirm you’re a real human.
Until you find yourself on the phone with the interviewer and they’re not just chatting you up. They’re asking you real questions, some of them tough questions, and your throat is going dry and you’re talking a million miles a minute and then it’s all over and you’re wondering what just happened. Did you blow your chances at another interview?
The phone interview is easy to underestimate. It doesn’t seem as intimidating as meeting in person, but if you don’t nail the phone interview you definitely won’t be asked to come for an on-site.
To set you up for success, we’ve put together seven easy tips that will help you prepare for your phone interview and give you the best shot at advancing to the next round.
Learn everything you can about the company. Scour their website, social media, LinkedIn, and current news for info. You need to know the facts of who they are and what they’re doing, plus their mission and values. (Know your audience!)
Learn everything you can about the job. Review the job description with a fine-tooth comb and check for reviews on Glassdoor. By knowing the skills and qualities they want in a candidate, you’ll be able to craft answers for their interview questions that show you are exactly who they’re looking for.
Now that you know what skills and qualities they’ll be asking about, start thinking through your work history and brainstorming which experiences will best illustrate what they want.
So when you’re asked, “Do you work well under pressure?” you won’t just say “yes”—you’ll also recount the story of your company’s product launch from hell and describe how you managed to stay calm, come up with a successful plan B for your team, and crank out quality copy at the last minute.
Outline each success story, then practice telling them to a friend (ideally in thirty seconds or less per story).
Make sure each success story you provide not only answers the question, but demonstrates the skills and qualities the company is looking for.
“What is your biggest strength?”
“What is your greatest weakness?”
“How are you with time management?”
“Why are you leaving your current position?”
“Why do you want to join our company?”
“Why should we hire you?”
“Tell me about a time you took initiative or stepped into a leadership role.”
“…a time you had to deal with conflict at work.”
“…a situation where you used problem solving.”
“…a time you collaborated on a team project.”
“…a time you went beyond your job description.”
“Tell me about your proudest professional accomplishment.”
At some point, the interviewer will ask if you have any questions. Having zero could be taken as a red flag, so plan out four to five relevant questions, such as:
“What will be the training process for this position?”
“Can you tell me more about the team I would be working with?”
“What opportunities would I have for advancement within the company?”
“What are the next steps in the interview process?”
These questions communicate that you’re serious about the position and you want to confirm whether the company’s a good fit for you.
Practice courtesy and professionalism. Within twenty-four hours, follow up with the interviewer by sending a thank you note via email.
Thank them for the opportunity to interview, express your continued interest, and reiterate how you would be a great fit for the position.
The future perfect continuous, also sometimes called the future perfect progressive, is a verb tense that describes actions that will continue up until a point in the future. The future perfect continuous consists of will + have + been + the verb’s present participle (verb root + -ing).
When we describe an action in the future perfect continuous tense, we are projecting ourselves forward in time and looking back at the duration of that activity. The activity will have begun sometime in the past, present, or in the future, and is expected to continue in the future.
Remember that nonaction verbs like to be, to seem, or to know are not suited to the future perfect continuous tense. Instead, these verbs take the future perfect tense, which is formed with will + have + past participle.
We all procrastinate from time to time and struggle to get things done. For years, much of the dialogue around procrastination has been about how to fight it and, theoretically, win. However, that approach has left a whole lot of us—included me—feeling pretty pathetic when we just can’t kick the habit. Turns out, we’ve been duped. For the last several years, experts have made headway in transforming procrastination from an evil that must be vanquished to a tool worth embracing in all its paradoxical and oxymoronic glory.
Let me introduce you to productive procrastination.
I almost giggle when I say it because it feels like I’m getting away with something very bad. However, when you learn a bit and start to incorporate productive procrastination into your life, it’s far from naughty—it’s so nice. Procrastination done right can help you clarify your goals, remove unnecessary tasks, and be more creative. But you can go beyond that. Here are a few indulgent ways you can get more (productive) procrastination into your life.
1 Become an active procrastinator.
The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one. The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.
—Robert Benchley
The main idea here is that you learn to pit your tasks against each other so that in procrastinating on one, you actually accomplish a lot of others. This can mean structuring to do lists so that your bigger, more vague tasks are at the top, but the actual work you need to do that day is somewhere lower down. Or just allow yourself to do something else as long as that something else isn’t binge-watching Netflix/scrolling through Facebook/pick your poison.
2 Try the “Nothing Alternative.”
Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist, coined the term “Nothing Alternative” to describe a strategy where you are given the choice between boredom and actually working on what you need to work on. The New York Times demonstrates the effectiveness of the method with the example of writer Raymond Chandler, who forced himself to write for hours a day by following two rules:
Judging by Chandler’s output, it seems you’ll get a lot done just to avoid boredom.
3 Get organized.
Lifehack put together a pretty good list of things to procrastinate with, but one item on their list deserves special attention—organization. In all its forms, organization can be simple and makes life easier. There’s also a short feedback loop so you feel good about what you’ve accomplished. (Flow, anyone?) The best part is that organization can be for the task you actually need to do, and it doesn’t need to be particularly coherent (yet). For example, organizing your desk before writing or creating a blog to-do list—rather than writing the blog—can move you in the right direction but scratch your procrastination itch.
So, let go of some of the guilt and embrace active, productive procrastination as a way to get more done.
Are you a procrastinator? What are some ways that you “productively procrastinate”?
Most hiring managers say they’d rule out a candidate for resume typos, but is that a good practice for your business? There are a few reasons it might not be.
Job applicants are urged to review their resumes more than a few times to ensure there are no misspellings or grammatical errors. To be safe, they should even have a friend or associate review it. But as hiring managers know all too well, even the most diligent candidates can occasionally let a typo or two slip by.
For hiring managers who review resumes, one typo can be a huge disappointment. When a candidate is otherwise perfect on paper, it can be difficult to give them a chance. However, there are a few good reasons to rethink that policy.
That candidate with the resume error? Chances are, nobody else is offering an interview. One survey found that 76 percent of executives would rule out an applicant over just one typo in a resume. With so many businesses finding competition fierce for talented professionals, forgiving a mistake or two could mean landing a great specialist ahead of competitors.
Some typos are simple grammatical errors that may slip by unnoticed. Some could simply be a sign that the candidate isn’t a professional resume writer. All of the other applicants may have paid a professional to create or review their resume, making them not necessarily the best candidate on their own. The best applicant may be the person who painstakingly put together a resume and reviewed it multiple times, hoping to make the best impression, yet somehow missed an error somewhere on the page.
A typo can signal a lack of attention to detail, which may be important if you’re hiring a data analyst or CFO. However, there are many professionals who can do a great job while making an occasional mistake. Consider the type of position and whether a missing letter here or there would affect that person’s work output before sending the resume to the recycle bin.
In the end, it’s more about the reason for the typo than the fact that it’s there. Psychologist Tom Stafford told Wired that when we write, we’re usually more focused on the concepts we’re conveying than the words on the page. This can lead to typos, especially when those words must serve an important purpose, such as landing a dream job. When proofing our own work, we often pay more attention to the concepts we’re communicating than the words themselves, making it easy to skim over mistakes without seeing them. This actually makes it highly likely that a document like a resume could contain an error for years without the candidate noticing. In fact, hirers could have errors on their own resumes that they’re unaware of.
A typo may be the least of your worries. A perfectly-formatted resume may not actually be perfect once you look “under the hood.” More than half of HR professionals surveyed say they’ve caught a candidate lying on a resume, with some of those lies being complete fabrications. What’s more important—a grammar mistake, or someone embellishing a past career role? You’re probably more likely to see a candidate lying on their resume than leaving out a letter or misspelling a word. Instead of concerning yourself with resume perfection, it might be more important to focus on checking resumes and researching potential hires online.
While job applicants are encouraged to do everything they can to avoid mistakes on their resumes, it’s also important for hiring managers to know when they should completely rule an applicant out for a mistake. In some cases, they may be the ones making the mistake by missing out on a talented worker.
A journalist and digital consultant, John Boitnott has worked at TV, print, radio and Internet companies for 20 years. He’s an advisor at StartupGrind and has written for BusinessInsider, Fortune, NBC, Fast Company, Inc., Entrepreneur and Venturebeat. You can find him on Twitter here.
What is the difference between sometime and some time? And where does sometimes fit into the equation? Don’t worry, the answer is simpler than you might think.
There are two ways to use sometime as one word. Let’s tackle the harder one first.
When you use sometime as an adverb, it refers to an unspecified point in time. It doesn’t refer to a span of time—that’s what some time is for.
Here’s an example of sometime used in a sentence.
In the sentence above, we’re not talking about how long it will take to finish the book (span of time); we’re talking about when the book will be finished (point in time). You can usually replace sometime with someday or at some point when it’s used this way.
Here are a few more examples:
OK, now let’s talk about the other way to use sometime. When you use sometime as an adjective, it just means “former.” Sometime should always be one word when you’re using it as an adjective.
In the sentence above, sometime cab driver means “former cab driver.” Some writers use sometime to mean “occasional,” but that usage isn’t accepted by everybody. If you’re not sure whether your audience will interpret sometime as “former” or “occasional,” it may be a good idea to avoid the ambiguity and use more specific terms.
And, remember, when you use sometime as an adjective, don’t put an s at the end of it.
When some time is two words, it refers to a span of time. In fact, it often means “a long time.”
In the sentence above, we’re talking about a long span of time—several centuries, in fact. That’s definitely a long time.
Let’s look at another example:
Again, we’re talking about a span of time, so some time should be two words.
Sometimes is a one-word adverb that means “occasionally” or “now and then.”
Plenty of writers have trouble remembering how to use some time, sometime and sometimes. The good news is that once you understand the difference between some time vs. sometime, it gets easier to understand other tricky pairs like any time vs. anytime and any more vs. anymore.
People use both further and farther to mean “more distant.” However, American English speakers favor farther for physical distances and further for figurative distances.
Ray LeBlond once said “You learn something every day if you pay attention.” Today is the day to learn the difference between further and farther.
Unsurprisingly, farther means “at or to a greater distance.” In Salt to the Sea, Ruta Sepetys uses this adverb to describe the activity of some sea vessels: Some boats eventually floated ashore. And some boats, like me, seemed to float farther and farther from land.
Besides physical distance, farther can also refer to “a more advanced point” or “to a greater extent.” In the following quote from The Great Gatsby, for example, farther describes how arms are stretched to a greater extent.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
The farther you go . . . the harder it is to return. The world has many edges and it’s easy to fall off. —Anderson Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival
What’s the difference between further and farther? The definition of further does overlap with farther, but first let’s look at the meanings that are unique to this term. Further, unlike farther, can be a verb: He’d do anything to further his own interests at the company. It means “to aid in the progress of, to promote, or to move forward.” As an adverb, further means “in addition to.” As an adjective, it means “more, extended, or additional.” For instance, you might ask for further information or pursue further education. Consider this quote from The Life of Pi by Yann Martel:
You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.
How do the definitions of farther and further overlap? Can you use further or farther away in the same way? Some usage guides disagree, but both terms have been used interchangeably to describe physical distance. Here is a quote in which further fulfills that role:
The further from one another, the nearer one can be. —August Strindberg, The Road to Damascus
In response to a question from a writer, The Chicago Manual of Style deferred to Webster’s 11th Collegiate Dictionary, which states: “Farther and further have been used more or less interchangeably throughout most of their history, but currently they are showing signs of diverging. As adverbs they continue to be used interchangeably whenever spatial, temporal, or metaphorical distance is involved. But where there is no notion of distance, further is used.” Notice how further is used in this quote from The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis:
“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now . . . Come further up, come further in!”
How do you express the idea that something is completely untrue? Is the correct expression farther from the truth or further from the truth? A quote from Popularity Explained by Alex L. Freeman reveals the answer: The dictionary definition of popularity is “to be liked by many.” Based on this definition, you might predict that popular students are the cheeriest and most agreeable people in a school: kind to everyone and always willing to lend a helping hand. Such a conclusion couldn’t be further from the truth!
Are further and farther impossible to tell apart from one another? No! Nothing could be further from the truth! If you remember that only further can mean “moreover,” you shouldn’t have much difficulty. That’s one thing learned for today, but what will you investigate tomorrow?
Some words have multiple correct spellings. You probably already know this is true for certain verbs (e.g., spell vs. spelt) and several nouns (e.g., color, favor, neighbor); prepositions aren’t immune to it either. That’s why we have both toward and towards.
The only difference between toward and towards is the s. Both spellings are correct, and they mean the same thing: in the direction of.
Toward is the preferred spelling in the United States and Canada. In other English-speaking countries, such as the United Kingdom and Australia, towards is the more common spelling. The Chicago Manual of Style notices this difference; The AP Stylebook recommends using the shorter spelling.
Both spellings of the word can be traced all the way back to Old English. Toward, as we know it now, evolved from toweard, which meant “in the direction of.” Toweards was the Old English adverb derived from toweard by adding the adverbial genitive s.
