10 Habits Today’s Writers Share

Whether you realize it or not, you’re a writer.

It’s hard not to be one in the information age, when writing is essential, if not inescapable. Maybe you’re keeping up with old friends and upcoming assignments. Or perhaps you’re trying to impress a hiring committee or a hot date. We’re constantly dashing off notes and status updates with a regularity that would’ve been the envy of anyone in the era of telegrams and typewriters, let alone the cloistered monks who hand-copied ancient scrolls by candlelight.

It’s easier than ever to hammer out reams of words on all manner of gadgets that can go just about anywhere. The act of writing is hardly confined to the monastery, er, office; we do it in coffee shops, on the train, and in bed. We send text messages and respond to emails when we’re half asleep, when we’re getting a ride home, or maybe having just stepped out of the shower.

At Grammarly, we help legions of writers just like you get their ideas down clearly and in ways that will help them look sharp. We also learn a lot about what writers are like – from what programs they use to what time of day their prose usually comes out looking its best. After proofreading and analyzing more than a billion words, here are a few of the patterns we’ve found particularly interesting about how you tend to write:

1 The average writer cranks out roughly a thousand words per week.

Among U.S. Grammarly users, the weekly average is 980 words, to be precise. Multiply that by 52 weeks, and you’re mashing out 50,960 words each year. That’s about equivalent to a light summer novel – enough of a read to last through several lazy days at the beach, at least.

2 That’s mostly in emails, according to user data, along with programs like Microsoft Word – but plenty of writing also happens online in social media and blogs.

Hundreds of thousands of new statuses and comments appear on Facebook every. single. minute. (Rules of punctuation trampled here for emphasis.) This is to say nothing of the perhaps dozens of text messages you might send back and forth each day. Frequent texters can crank out thousands of words per month, just in their preferred messaging app.

3 Most of the mistakes you make in emails are misspelled words.

Users averaged around a dozen mistakes per every hundred words – and more than half of those were spelling errors.

4 You’re especially prone to making gaffes on social media – nearly three times as likely as anywhere else you write.

This may not surprise you, as such platforms tend to be more casual and invite lots of slang and abbreviations, tbh. Here, we found an average of close to 40 mistakes in every hundred typed words.

5 What time of day you write has a clear impact on how often you make mistakes.

We found a decided difference between the patterns of early birds, who write from 4 to 8 a.m., and night owls, who work from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. As you might guess, one seems clear-headed and fresh, while the other is a bit more more muddled. Indeed:

6 You tend to do your best writing early in the morning – before 8 a.m.

Across platforms, early birds averaged 13.8 mistakes per 100 words – 3.2 fewer than the night owls’ 17.

7 Those writing for blogs make the fewest mistakes after lunch, between 1 and 5 p.m. Even so, early birds still outperformed night owls, with the 4 to 8 a.m. crowd averaging 5.6 mistakes per 100 words, compared to the night owls’ 9.1.

8 Still, good writing can happen at any time.

It’s worth noting there is some evidence that staying up late to work may be an evolutionarily advantageous behavior associated with high intelligence – even if folks who do it need to be extra mindful of their writing.

9 Apostrophe mistakes were the most common source of errors.

A common example is let’s vs. lets. The former is a contraction of “let us,” while the latter means “allows,” as in “this lets us avoid similar errors.” (Of course, you can always brush up on sound apostrophe usage right here.)

10 Too vs. To was next down the list, followed by Everyday vs. Every Day

Rounding out the most common mistakes were such mix-ups as than vs. then, there vs. their, and of vs. off. As ever, you can find tips on our blog – answers to such questions and more are right there.

As we wrap up, there’s one more fun observation we’d like to share about writers online, which applies more broadly, not just to folks using Grammarly:

11 Bonus – Writers on the web may be using more and more languages, not just English.

English enjoyed something of a head start among early Internet users and was once regarded as the default language of the web. As the British linguist David Graddol wrote two decades ago in his paper “The Future of English?”:

The system has its origins in the academic and, in particular, scientific community, which is the longest connected community of all. English is deeply established among scientists as the international lingua franca and, from this beginning, English appears to have extended its domain of use to become the preferred lingua franca for the many new kinds of user who have come online in the 1990s…

In a reflection that looks increasingly prescient, Graddol goes on to note that at the time, some 90 percent of the computers online were connected through English-speaking countries, suggesting that in the years since, as the technology has grown ever more global, it’s gotten easier and easier to communicate in other languages.

Indeed, some estimate that now just over half of all content on the web is in English, but it’s not easy to track precisely; other experts believe it’s below 40 percent. Notably, in China, hundreds of millions of users blog and post updates in Chinese to social media sites like Renren and Sina Weibo.

Whatever your preferred language, platform, or time of day to work, it’s always worth a second look to make sure your writing is radiant and clear.

Here’s the Real History of Mother’s Day

Did moms come up with Mother’s Day as an easy way to get pancakes in bed? Did activists fight for its adoption as a way to get folks to focus on peace? Or did card companies invent it as a way to make a few (billion) bucks?

If you answered all of the above, you’re right. Well, at least partially. Peace activists did play a role in early versions of Mother’s Day, and makers of cards and candy (not to mention florists) do get to rake in the rewards the second week of May every year. And yes, who would ever pass up an excuse for pancakes?

But there’s more to the history of Mother’s Day than meets the eye. In addition to the hidden history of the holiday, there’s a whole lot of controversy, from debates about who came up with the holiday first, to lawsuits about who’s able to use the name “Mother’s Day,” to one of the founders actually trying to get the holiday scratched from the books, even after fighting to get it recognized as a national day. Besides all that, there’s the question of where that pesky apostrophe goes. (Don’t worry: we’ve got you covered on that one.)

Here are the secrets of Mother’s Day and its history. And, for good measure, a few ideas on how to celebrate your own mom on the second Sunday of May.

The Birth of Mother’s Day

The origin of Mother’s Day as we know it took place in the early 1900s. A woman named Anna Jarvis started a campaign for an official holiday honoring mothers in 1905, the year her own mother died. The first larger-scale celebration of the holiday was in 1908, when Jarvis held a public memorial for her mother in her hometown of Grafton, West Virginia.

Over the next few years, Jarvis pushed to have the holiday officially recognized, and it was celebrated increasingly in more and more states around the U.S. Finally, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation making Mother’s Day an official holiday, to take place the second Sunday of May.

Anna Jarvis put Mother’s Day on the calendar as a day dedicated to expressing love and gratitude to mothers, acknowledging the sacrifices women make for their children. That’s why she was determined to keep “Mother’s” a singular possessive, as marked by the apostrophe before “s.” Each family should celebrate its own mother, so that individual women across the country could feel the love, even in the midst of a broad celebration of motherhood.

Other Mother’s Days

Before Anna Jarvis worked to get a day just for recognizing mothers, her own mom played an important role uniting women for good causes. Mama Jarvis—also known as Ann Reeves Jarvis—cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the field during the Civil War, and in its aftermath she organized a “Mothers’ Friendship Day,” the goal of which was to foster reconciliation between former Union and Confederate soldiers by having them come together, along with mothers from both sides. With the senior Jarvis’ lifelong focus on caring for children and promoting peace, it’s no wonder her daughter fought for a day just for moms.

At around the same time Ann Reeves Jarvis was working with mothers in the spirit of peace, Julia Ward Howe, another activist—as well as abolitionist and suffragette—worked to have June 2 be celebrated as “Mother’s Peace Day,” and wrote a “Mother’s Day Proclamation” calling on mothers to work toward world peace.

These women and others were responsible for precursors to Mother’s Day in American culture, but celebrations of motherhood go back deeper than that. Such celebrations sometimes involved worship of a mother deity, such as the Goddess Isis in Ancient Egypt, or Cybele and Rhea in Ancient Greece. In other cases, celebrations were only tangentially about mothers: Mothering Sunday in the United Kingdom, for example, was originally dedicated to the “Mother Church,” but was later broadened to honor human mothers, too.

Around the world, Mother’s Day is celebrated in a variety of ways and on different dates throughout the year, though many countries observe the holiday on the same day as the United States—proof of the powerful impact made by Anna Jarvis.

The Big Mother’s Day Controversy

Even after Anna Jarvis was successful in getting Mother’s Day made an official national holiday, she wasn’t satisfied with the way that holiday was celebrated. She had teamed up with florists while she was lobbying to get the holiday recognized, even recommending a white carnation as the symbolic flower of Mother’s Day.

However, in the first few years of the holiday’s official existence, Jarvis observed as florists, candy-makers and card-makers, and even charities used Mother’s Day as a way to make an extra buck. The commercialization of Mother’s Day, according to Jarvis, defeated the whole point of a holiday that was supposed to be about celebrating the personal, individual connection between a mother and her children.

From about 1920 onward, Jarvis fought hard to prevent businesses from profiting by means of Mother’s Day cards, candy, flowers, and other gifts. Although she had fought to be recognized as the one and only “Mother of Mother’s Day,” she later lobbied to have the holiday removed from the calendar of national holidays, and spent piles of her own money in lawsuits against profiteers she saw as using the Mother’s Day name in vain.

The Commercialization of Mother’s Day

Did Anna Jarvis have success getting people to cut down on the consumerism? If you’re considering buying your mother a card or a bouquet of flowers, you’ve got your answer.

The National Retail Federation does a yearly survey to find out how much Americans are planning on spending for Mother’s Day. Here’s a hint: most people aren’t busting out the crayons to make a homemade card.

In 2017, the expected total spending for Mother’s Day in the United States is $23.6 billion. That’s an average of $186.39 per shopper. In the fourteen years the National Retail Federation has conducted the Mother’s Day spending survey, that’s the highest amount yet.

But don’t feel bad if you’re not planning on forking up quite so much. There are plenty of ways to celebrate Mom without emptying your wallet. It’s all about making it special.

How to Celebrate Mother’s Day Today

For most modern moms, going out to brunch or getting a Hallmark card and a fat bunch of flowers will do the trick. Sure, Anna Jarvis will roll her eyes, but if Mom’s grateful, where’s the real harm?

If you want to go the Anna Jarvis route, make your own card or write a letter to show your love to your mommy dearest. Need inspiration? Use a phrase involving the word “mother” (like, “Word to your mother” or “Shall I be mother?”) or a nice mom-centric quotation. Here’s a good one:

There is no way to be a perfect mother, and a million ways to be a good one. – Jill Churchill

More where those came from here.

For some more free alternatives, you can pick up the phone (fun fact: Mother’s Day marks the highest phone traffic of the year in the United States), take Mom for a walk (if you live nearby), or send over something sentimental, like these pictures of animal moms with their cubs, pups, kits, or kids. Irresistible, right?

Most importantly, show your mom that she (and Grammarly) taught you well by putting the apostrophe in the right place when you write “Happy Mother’s Day.”

How to Stop Procrastinating and Take Control of Your Life

Are you procrastinating? Is there an essay or a blog post you just can’t seem to get done? We could suggest:

Don’t put off until tomorrow what can be done today.

Though, it won’t likely help.

Why not? Professionals, students, educators, writers, and so on have all heard this advice, and we all feel compelled to follow it, but—let’s be frank—it’s not easy to just “stop procrastinating.” We don’t procrastinate for the sake of procrastination or laziness. There are emotional and psychological barriers that manifest behaviorally as “procrastination,” and it’s important to understand these before trying to learn how not to procrastinate.

What Is Procrastination?

Though we all have experience with putting things off, that doesn’t mean we necessarily understand it. Simply:

Procrastination is a state in which one is delaying work on or completion of a task or project.

It’s important to note, however, that there is good procrastination and bad procrastination. Good procrastination helps you get more done while bad procrastination just makes you miserable with little to show for it. It is possible to procrastinate the right way and reap the benefits. Let’s assume, however, that you want to avoid the bad kind of procrastination (who doesn’t?). Here’s how.

Why Do People Procrastinate?

It may be useful for you to think for a few minutes about why you are postponing a given task. Often, the cause of your procrastination differs according to the task. What are the top reasons for procrastination? Generally, they are:

• feeling overwhelmed
• confusion
• boredom
• lack of motivation
• distraction

When writing, for example, procrastination normally comes from confusion or feeling overwhelmed. When I have to do the dishes, it comes from boredom. It’s important to understand the enemy before it can be defeated. Isolate the root(s) of your procrastination.

We’ll address methods of dealing with confusion, feeling overwhelmed, being bored, lacking motivation, and being distracted.

Ways to Stop Procrastinating

While it does take time to plan and organize for productivity, it will pay for itself over the life of your project or goal. Avoid procrastination with these eight tips.

Coping with Confusing and Overwhelming Tasks

1Make Written To-Do Lists

To-do lists are a tried-and-true way of getting your bearings and keeping yourself from getting overwhelmed. They also help you organize your thoughts and can prevent confusion. It’s ideal to make a new list at the end of each day to prepare for the next day. Keep in mind, however, this tip won’t help much if you over-plan or set actionable tasks that cannot be completed in less than half an hour. If a task takes longer than thirty minutes, break it up into smaller tasks.

2Start Each List (and Day) With One Important Task

Uncertainty about how to manage all the steps of a larger task can feel overwhelming. The antidote? Organization and proactivity. Accomplishing something toward your goal is a great way to empower yourself to take on the next step or to free up your energies for other tasks throughout the day. Choose one task or group of tasks each day that you should complete in order to feel productive. Do these tasks first.

3Seek Information and Support

When we are overwhelmed or confused by how to move forward with a task, it can come from feeling inadequately prepared for taking on the task. If this is true for you, work in some time (and tasks on your list) for seeking guidance. For example, if you are confused about an essay or writing task for school, a good place to seek guidance is from your professor, your adviser, or a writing center tutor.

How do you cope with confusing and overwhelming tasks?

Coping with Boredom, Lack of Motivation, and Distraction

These particular causes of procrastination are common among students writing for a mandatory course or among professionals obliged to complete reports and documents regarding the mundane aspects of their work. This is especially true when the project isn’t something you have chosen for yourself. Luckily, not only are there great ways to get motivated, but there are also some helpful ways to avoid procrastination.

4Establish a Purpose

It is difficult to pick a route if you haven’t yet determined a destination. Many people are not creative when thinking about their “destination.” More often than not, if your sole reason for doing something is simply to finish it, you will succeed, but miserably. Remember those midnight sessions writing drafts of your dissertation, hours before it was due? Yes, the drafts were completed, but under great stress. Wanting to finish a task isn’t enough to stave off procrastination. Purpose matters. Be creative with your goals. Try to establish a broader purpose that you are passionate about and fit the task at hand into your plan for progressing toward that goal.

5Don’t Take On Too Much

This tip is also something that can help with feeling overwhelmed. Often, if you have taken on a huge task and have not allotted enough time to complete it in smaller bite-size chunks, the lack of progress can result in boredom. A huge task can also induce a sense of inferiority that leads to lack of motivation. To prevent stagnation, boredom, and sureness-sucking lack of motivation, work in small chunks over a longer period of time. The sense of accomplishment that will come from this habit will kill the dullness and incompetence you may have felt otherwise.

6Break Up Unpleasant Tasks With Pleasant Ones

This may be seem obvious because it is so simple; however, many people are gluttons for punishment and continually create situations where they immerse themselves in unpleasant circumstances without taking ownership for their ability to improve their situation. If you are sick of doing something (inevitably, at some point or another, we all will be), take a productive break and do something refreshing. A short diversion is worth more than the time it costs. Rewards for achievements foster productivity. Incorporate these activities into your written lists during your organization process.

7Create an Ideal Environment

Distractions arise when your environment is imperfect for your work. If distractions are a real issue for you and organizing your tasks does not relieve the impulse to procrastinate, it is vital that you take a look around and find out what is blocking your productivity. Distractions can range from background noise to a stiff chair, from a cluttered desk to Facebook. Do what you need to do in order to remove or avoid these elements. Many of us are distracted by the Internet. (“I’ll watch just one more cat video.” Yeah, right.) Develop the discipline to work in a space without Internet connectivity or build idle Internet browsing into your schedule (see tip three).

8Stop Procrastinating and Just Start

Like jumping into a cold lake, the anticipation and initial dive into a project are the most difficult and unpleasant. Once you start, you acclimate and the process becomes tolerable, sometimes even enjoyable. Once you get over the first “hump,” accomplishment, inspiration and confidence have room to motivate your work.

These suggestions are aimed at addressing some of the primary sources of anxiety and discomfort that lead to dilatory habits. There are various tips and tricks for overcoming procrastination, which can vary greatly according to a person’s individual needs. While all of these tips may not fit your particular situation, starting at step one—determining the root of your procrastination—will give you all the direction you need for finding the ideal solution for you.

How do you avoid bad procrastination? Which of these strategies works well for you?

Dragged or Drug—Which Is Correct?

The recognized and correct past tense form of the verb drag is dragged. Drug can still sometimes be heard, but only in certain dialects within the United States.

Sometimes, a group of people have a way of speaking that’s particular to them. It can be a phrase they’ve coined. It can be a bending of the generally accepted linguistic norms. It can be pronunciation, spelling, or grammar misinterpretations. And the criteria for membership to the group can differ as well—a group can be made up of people who were educated at the same institution. It can be made up of people who live in a single geographic region. It can be made up of people who share common ancestry, or political ideas, or social class—it doesn’t matter. As long as there’s a group and there’s a noticeable difference in the way they use language, we call it a “dialect.” Dialectical differences might be broad tendencies, like pronunciation, or specific quirks, like using drug as the past tense of the verb drag.

How to Use Drag and Past Tense of Drag

For the majority of English-speakers, drag is a regular verb used in a couple of different ways, but always having to do with movement. So we can say we drag ourselves home after work, we drag our dogs to the vet, or we drag our tables across the floor, but we can also drag a field or drag as in drag race.

Being a regular verb, the past participle of drag is made by adding the suffix -ed and doubling the g at the end of the infinitive. If you do all that, you get dragged, which is the widely accepted past tense of the verb drag. It’s also the verb’s past participle.

Where Does Drug Come From?

Drug is used in some American dialects as the past participle or past tense of the verb drag. It’s not one of those things where British English and American English differ—dragged is still the recognized past participle of the verb drag in the US. But, especially in some southern parts of the country, drag is sometimes treated as an irregular verb, and that’s where we get drug.

Which Form Should You Use?

Dragged is always the safer bet. If you live in or are passing through a town and you hear a lot of people saying drug, you can switch to it if you like. But all in all, drag is a regular verb, and there’s no need to complicate it.

Examples of Dragged

Two pilots were dragged out of the cockpit and arrested moments before their plane was set to take off over fears they were drunk. —NEWS.com.au

This is the extraordinary moment a passenger was dragged along a station platform after getting her hand stuck in a train door. —The Daily Mail

Terrified tourists in China were dragged screaming across a dizzying glass walkway—suspended hundreds of feet in the air over a canyon. —The Daily Mirror

Examples of Drug

She refused to exit the vehicle and was drug out of the vehicle. —Merrill Foto News

She wasn’t carried out of the house. She was drug out of the house. —Rapid City Journal

To that extent, Networx was handicapped out of the gate when the licensing process was drug out over 18 months by telecoms like Time Warner, which wanted to prevent Memphis from obtaining a competitive edge in the industry. —Memphis Flyer

We’re Snoring Because Your Poem is So Boring

Welcome to one of our favorite holidays of the year: Bad Poetry Day. August 18 brings with it the license and the freedom to let those terrible sonnets fly.

Sure, many of us remember our high school days when just about any drama would send us scurrying to the page to dash off a few lines. However, the resulting text is not exactly what we mean by bad poetry. Even those stanzas, penned when we were young, were important to us. They may not have had the literary brilliance that age and experience brings, but they were full of real emotion.

In the context of Bad Poetry Day, bad poetry means boring poetry. It means penning dull lines about uninteresting topics. Perhaps the best way to learn about a “bad” poem is to explore some important elements of a “good” poem.

Structure: Most beginning poets get this element wrong right away. How do you properly break up your lines and stanzas? Is it all random? Do you just make a break whenever you are tired of a block of text? Well, if you want a bad poem, then the answer is yes. It’s true that lines and stanzas lend shape to the poem, but they also suggest meaning. Generally, they help guide the audience in reading, or reciting, the poem correctly.

Something to say: How many articles or poems have you read that don’t seem to have any point? What is the author’s purpose for writing the piece? Nothing loses an audience quicker than an obvious lack direction. There is plenty of idle chatter out there, so make sure that what you write is relevant to your audience.

Clarity: Being succinct and clear is important in any communication. This is just as true with poetry as it is prose. If you muddle the reader’s head with images that are bizarre or meaningless, how can you expect them to understand what you are trying to say?

Mood: The overall mood of a poem can shift, even in great poetry. However, if the mood is all over the place, then the poem begins to sound like a cacophony of different emotions. It’s important to know which feelings you are trying to evoke in your reader. Keep the mood clear, and only shift it when it becomes necessary to make your point.

Obtuse layers: Bad poetry is often impenetrable poetry. Shrouding your poem in thick, heavy symbolism forces your readers to work too hard to understand your meaning. For the most part, good poetry should be more like an apple than an onion. Your readers want to take a juicy bite, rather than sit around all day peeling layers.

Clichés: Another mistake made by beginning poets is the use of clichés. They make a poem heavy and dull as lead. One of the greatest joys of poetry is the chance to say something in a new way. It’s the perfect place to break out those fresh metaphors. When you start writing in clichés, it becomes clear as glass that you have not really given the poem much thought.

Rhyme: All poems contain lines that rhyme, right? Absolutely not. In fact, with the appearance of free verse poetry, rhyme became an option rather than a rule. Anything goes in poetry, now. However, it’s important to be familiar with the traditional rules of poetry before you begin to break them. Rhymes are not random. It’s not a good idea to sit around with a dictionary just to get a good rhyme in your poem. It creates far more problems than it solves.

There you have it, a few guidelines of some of the elements of good poetry. Feel free to break them all and write a truly bad poem. We can’t wait to read those awful lines. Have fun!