And the Oscar for Best Grammar Goes to. . .

Every year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences creates a Hollywood spectacle to honor the best films, actors, screenwriters, directors, and more. Before the Academy rolls out the red carpet on February 28 to announce 2016’s Oscar winners, we decided to roll out the red pen (metaphorically speaking) and rank the movies, actors, and actresses by how well their fans write when they’re buzzing about them online.

First, we looked at fan-written movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. We gathered the most recent one hundred four- and five-star reviews of at least fifteen words for each film, analyzed them with Grammarly, and then verified them with a team of live proofreaders. We counted only black-and-white mistakes, such as misspellings, wrong and missing punctuation, misused or missing words, and subject-verb disagreement. We ignored stylistic variations, such as common slang words, nicknames, serial commas, or the use of numerals instead of spelled-out numbers.

Then, we set out for IMDb and followed the same procedure to rank the Best Actor/Actress and Best Supporting Actor/Actress nominees according to how well IMDb commenters wrote when they discussed them in the forums. We also searched out the top three adjectives or phrases commenters used to describe the celebs.

Leonardo DiCaprio may be the odds-on favorite to win an Oscar for The Revenant, but the “amazing, desperate guy,” who has yet to score an Oscar, didn’t fare well in our research, coming in second-to-last—just above Sylvester Stallone, who’s nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Creed. Although Variety predicts that The Big Short will walk away with the gleaming golden statue for Best Picture, where fan grammar is concerned, Brooklyn takes the win.

Of course, our research is all in the name of fun and good grammar. To see who really gets to step up to the microphone and say “I’d like to thank the Academy,” you’ll have to tune in to the 88th Academy Awards on Sunday, February 28.

14 Business Jargon Phrases People Love To Hate

When humans aggregate into groups, we tend to develop new lexicons specific to our group context. Wizards complain about “muggles,” high schoolers aspire to “squad goals”—and occasionally a mid-level manager stares fervently into your eyes and tells you it’s time to “shift the paradigm.”

In recent years business jargon has somehow evolved into a tangled mess of annoying, pretentious, tired clichés that are more effective at obscuring than clarifying meaning.

If you haven’t guessed already, this post is for all you noble crusaders against jargon (a.k.a. “haters”) who have had enough of “moving the needle,” “idea showers,” and “putting your ducks in row.” Whether you’re a jargon-hater or you consider it a necessary (if annoying) part of office life, take a moment during your “bio break” to enjoy our list of the worst workspeak phrases we love to hate.

via GIPHY

1Low-Hanging Fruit

Are you skipping blithely through an orchard, plucking apples for your grandmother’s pie? No? We didn’t think so. This ridiculous phrase is all about going for the quick fix and the easy win in order to get immediate results. So go ahead and put all the hard stuff on the “back burner”—there’s zero chance that could come back to bite you, right?

2Leverage

Mind-numbingly overused, and a favorite of managers attempting to “climb the ladder.”

“Leveraging our goodwill with millennials will help us increase sales.”

Please, quit deluding yourself. Incessantly using “leverage” as a verb does not increase our estimation of your intelligence.

3Open the Kimono

One of the stranger artifacts of office lingo, “open the kimono” means to reveal information or secrets, such as the inner workings of a company or the details of a project. If being low-key racist and sexist doesn’t turn you off, this phrase is also exceptionally creepy.

4Giving 110%

A hyperbolic phrase synonymous with “going above and beyond.” Translation: “We’d like you to work fourteen-hour days for the next two weeks because of an arbitrary decision the CEO made.” Unless you’re a professional athlete or Little League coach, this phrase should not be in your vocabulary.

5Learnings

One of the most heinous buzzwords to crawl out of the office petri dish.

“On this next slide I’ll share my main learnings from the conference.”

Please, don’t ever share your “learnings” with us, just tell us what you learned. #MakeLearningAVerbAgain

6Out of Pocket

A term with dubious etymology meaning “I won’t be available.”

“I’ll be out of pocket this week. You can reach out to my assistant with any urgent requests.”

Okay, enough with the abysmal out-of-office messages. For those of you who would like to make a positive impression, here are ten out of office messages you’ll want to copy.

7Drink the Kool-Aid

Meaning to unquestioningly buy into something, such as a company’s “mission.” This common idiom originated from the mass suicide-massacre of 1978 when over 900 members of the Jonestown commune were forced to drink poisoned Flavor Aid by their crazed leader. So, maybe you should stop casually referencing horrific tragedies during your board meetings.

8Bio Break

An annoying and unnecessary euphemism for taking a bathroom break during a meeting. Seriously, all you need to do is announce a ten-minute break. You can spare us the details.

9Blue Sky Thinking

Thinking “outside the box” wasn’t enough. Your new imperative is to think in a way that is so exceptionally creative that you are unbound by the constraints of convention, common sense, or even reality. It’s all blue sky up there, baby!

10Tiger Team

A group of specialists assembled to tackle a particular problem.

“The Tiger Team is working to get the pension problem under control.”

Stop kidding yourself. Unless you’re an elite government hacker (the origin of the term) or you’re wearing tights and shouting “Thundercats, Hooo!” you are not in a Tiger Team.

11Idea Shower or Thought Shower

A brainstorm, but apparently with no brains required. Please keep your “thought showers” to yourself, thank you very much.

12Moving the Goalposts

Changing an expectation or parameter of an ongoing project, making the project more difficult to complete.

“If our client keeps moving the goalposts, we won’t be able to deliver their report on time!”

This is also a great way to cheat at games in your backyard, when you’re a child.

“Mom! Benny moved the goalposts again! It’s not fair!”

13Drill Down

To investigate something in detail. Synonymous with the equally insufferable “let’s unpack that” and “peeling the onion.”

14Gain Traction

An infuriatingly overused buzzword meaning “to gain popularity.”

“Our new SeeFood app has failed to gain traction, we’ve only had twelve downloads.”

Who knows, maybe you would gain more traction if you didn’t use such terrible business jargon all the time.

It’s your turn to weigh in! Circle back with the business jargon you dislike the most.

via GIPHY

You Will Want to Learn These 6 Time Management Tips

Are you feeling frustrated and unproductive? Like you’re constantly busy but the things that really matter aren’t getting done?

Check out these six time management tips that will help you increase productivity, lower stress, and get you closer to your goals!

1 Unplug From Email

There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more. —Neil Gaiman

Are emails pulling you away from your actual work? Finding your creative flow—especially when writing—is tough enough as it is. It doesn’t help to have the constant distraction of emails dinging into your inbox.

The solution? Instead of responding to each email as it comes in, have set times of day where you’ll work through all your messages. Schedule several hours of uninterrupted work so you can focus and get in the zone, then take thirty to sixty minutes to catch up on emails.

While you’re in work-mode, be sure to close your email tab on your browser and turn off notifications to your phone, so it’s out of sight, out of mind.

And don’t worry, unless you’re corresponding with galactic invaders, waiting a few hours to respond to your emails will not cause the world to end.

2 Don’t Just List Your To-Do’s—Schedule Them

Can’t find the time to get all your to-do’s done? There are plenty of awesome apps to help you organize your to-do lists, but have you tried scheduling tasks directly on your calendar?

Using your calendar of choice, create appointments for all your big to-do’s. You’ll have a visual reminder (and notifications) of exactly what you should be working on and when.

Remember to schedule tasks at your peak performance time. When and where are you at your most creative? Do you write best sitting in bed at midnight? Or at 7 a.m. in your favorite cafe? Avoid scheduling your creative work for times when you’re going to be tired or distracted.

Be realistic and give yourself enough time for each task. This can reduce guilt if you’ve felt like you should be getting more done, but can now see there aren’t enough hours in the day. And this can also reveal a problem if you’ve been wasting a lot of time on distractions or busy work.

3 Plan Your Week in Advance

Planning your week (or month) in advance will help you save time and maximize your productivity. Know when your deadlines, important meetings, and obligations are happening and work backwards from there.

Giving a presentation on Thursday morning? Block off your Wednesday night for prep time or rest.

Want to spend less time in the morning prepping your lunch? Schedule meal prep for Sunday night so you can batch your lunches.

Feeling burnt out and need to introvert? Schedule alone time for Tuesday. Know you’ll need human contact? Plan game night for Friday.

Scheduling things like gym time and laundry will keep your life running smoothly. And remember to always allow enough time for a good night’s rest—your work will take twice as long if you’re exhausted from too little sleep or working long hours without a break.

4 Banish Your Time Wasters

Spending way too much time browsing Facebook? Watching cat videos? Keeping up-to-the-second on developing news?

If your willpower is failing, you may need to give yourself some extra help to unplug from your time-wasters.

Remove time-wasting sites from your browser’s bookmark bar so you’re less tempted to visit them. Minimize distractions by turning off your phone notifications during work hours (or if that’s too advanced, just turn your phone on silent and toss it in a drawer).

In need of desperate measures? Download an app that will block you from visiting Facebook and other sites.

Of course, it’s worth differentiating between the true time-sucks and activities that aren’t work-related but are beneficial. Grabbing lunch with a friend is a great social thing to do. Just make sure you have a set start and end time, so you don’t chat for two hours and lose half the afternoon.

5 Break Free of Perfectionism

Sure, who doesn’t want their work to be perfect? But striving for perfection is a sure way to kill your productivity and creativity.

The pressure you feel to produce perfect work can lead to procrastination, anxiety, “playing it safe,” and a lot of wasted time making marginal improvements to work.

When you reset your expectations away from perfection, you’ll find it’s easier to experiment and take risks, to get projects finished and move on to bigger and better things.

Improving your writing takes a lot of practice. You’re not going to write a “perfect” novel or blog post or ad campaign the first time around. Don’t let the expectation of perfection paralyze you from growing your skills!

6 Prioritize Your Personal Goals

Are you using your time to get closer to your goals, or are you putting everyone and everything else first?

Maybe you want to build your audience, write your memoir, get your MFA, or change careers. Make yourself and your future a priority by scheduling time every week, or every day, to work toward your goals.

Large projects can feel overwhelming, so break things down into manageable pieces. If you want to finish your first draft in six months, how many pages will you need to complete per week? How many hours per day will you need to write?

Life may be busy, but don’t let anything get between you and achieving your dreams!

The Battle of the Brands (INFOGRAPHIC)

In these social-media driven times, a company’s image depends increasingly on its words. From blog posts, tweets, and Facebook status updates, to good ol’ fashioned billboards, a brand’s ability to deliver error-free copy is key. While only a handful of people might notice a minor grammatical blunder in a corporate LinkedIn page, major errors undermine the brand’s credibility. After all, if a company can’t even spell correctly, why would consumers trust them to deliver a quality product?

The Grammarly team decided to take a look at some of the top brand battles of all-time; we looked at recent LinkedIn posts from each company on the list, reviewing an average of nearly 400 words per company. After scouring the posts for errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, clear winners emerged:

• Coke vs. Pepsi: Coke makes four times fewer writing mistakes on Linkedin than Pepsi.
• Facebook vs. Google: Not only does Google dominate the Internet, but it also makes nearly four times fewer writing mistakes than Facebook on Linkedin.
• Ford vs. GM: GM makes two-and-a-half times more writing errors than Ford.

Now, it’s unlikely that you’ll choose Coke over Pepsi because of its superior command of the English language; at the consumer level, brand loyalty is based on more than advertising or web presence. However, the care that a company takes with its communications is often indicative of its overall attention to detail. Investors and competitors may judge sloppy writing, especially in the more formal setting of LinkedIn, as a sign of carelessness in a company’s overall corporate culture.

Small business owners and entrepreneurs are often under even greater scrutiny from eagle-eyed proofreaders, who have posted countless examples of bad grammar on sites like Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and Pleated-Jeans. The Internet has made it much easier to record, share, and immortalize these mistakes.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all social media liaisons and corporate bloggers need to be English literature professors. A skilled proofreader, whether in-house or freelance, will catch most errors. An automated proofreader like Grammarly can also help clean up copy quickly, which is perfect for smaller pieces with quick turnaround, like Tweets or status updates.

Speaking of Twitter and Facebook, it’s important to note that not all platforms are judged equally. Off-the-cuff social media can—and should—be more conversational and informal than business documents or print advertising. No one expects a 140-character Tweet to use perfect grammar and spelling, but corporations who attempt to be “hip” by using text slang often fail to impress their intended audience. Check out this roundup of corporate “Twitter fails” for examples of social media gone horribly wrong.

The rules of acceptable grammar are always changing—does anyone really bat an eye anymore at Wendy’s “late nite drive-thru?”—and too much inflexible formality in writing leads to stilted copy. While some grammar rules shouldn’t be broken (here’s a list of 25 common grammar mistakes to avoid), knowing the intended audience and the conventions of a particular social media platform can go a long way to setting the tone for your writing. In general, younger consumers care less about grammar than their older counterparts, and sites like LinkedIn are more formal than Twitter or Facebook.

Cool Things We Do With Words: Vows, Oaths, and Promises

What is more special than a promise? As children (and let’s be honest, as adults, too) we valued promises highly among our friends and family. The act of promising and the act of being worth promising something to elevates our relationships. It’s a perfect example of how beautiful and powerful words can be.

There are a lot of amazing activities we do with words and language. Few are as sacred or important as the vows or oaths that we make throughout our lives. Whether vocalized or put into writing, these words are something more than words alone; they convey an emotion and intent that is exclusive to the act of promising, the act of commitment to values and action.

This weekend, the President of the United States will be taking the Oath of Office for his second term. It is a very important promise to the U.S., but as we found out last week there are other vows and oaths that people believe have a larger impact in one’s life.

Which vows, oaths, or promises do you think carry the most weight?

Which of these promises do you think are the most beautifully worded?

Separate vs. Seperate

Along with loose and definitely, separate is one of the most commonly misspelled words in the English language. Separate can be an adjective or a verb. As an adjective, it means set apart, distinct, or not related. As a verb, it means to to set apart, to distinguish, or to divide. Separate is often misspelled as seperate, a word that has no meaning and is simply a misspelling:

They took two separate rooms.

They took two seperate rooms.

It took time to separate the dog from its favorite toy.

It took time to seperate the dog from its favorite toy.

Words related to separate, such as separately, separated, and separation, are often misspelled in the same fashion by turning the first a into an e:

They didn’t want to go to the party separately.

They didn’t want to go to the party seperately.

They remained best friends even though they were separated by war.

They remained best friends even though they were seperated by war.

How to Remember the Correct Spelling of Separate

There are a couple of ways to remember the correct spelling of separate. You can remember that the order of the vowels in the word is symmetrical: e-a-a-e. It might be easier to remember that there’s a rat in separate (sep-A-RAT-e).

Examples

Annapolis police recovered two handguns in separate incidents over the past few days.

The Baltimore Sun

One, they would get a separate queue at bank branches, along with differently abled persons.

The Times of India

On Thursday, Duterte sparked alarm by threatening to separate with the U.S. and ally instead with China.

CNBC

It was a hug nearly five decades in the making as two sisters separated by the Sixties Scoop reunited in Winnipeg on Tuesday.

CBC News