Grammarly Insights 2.0: Better, Faster, Smarter

For a while now, we’ve been working on improvements for Grammarly Insights based on your feedback. But until recently, this was an undercover job.

So, it’s with great jubilation that we reveal some big changes making their way to your inbox next week.

1 Monitor Your Trends

Until now, the weekly emails summarized your activity over the previous seven days. Moving forward, we will graph up to four weeks’ worth of progress in the Productivity, Mastery, and Vocabulary sections.

2 Badges (Earn and Learn)

Oh no, a marketing gimmick! We hear you. That’s why we’ve set out to create engaging badges that offer surprises, a lot of personality, and some real history along the way. You’ll get a special link to view an archive of your achievements any time you’d like.

3 Personal Records

You’ll now be alerted when you reach an all-time high for the Productivity and Vocabulary metrics. To be more specific, your total word count and unique word count for each week will be stored over time so that you’ll know when you’ve achieved an all-time personal record.

These next updates are not a one-and-done. We have more ideas for future enhancements. That being said, we want to hear from you. What are some features you’d like to see in future updates to Grammarly Insights? Let us know in the comment section below.

Thank you!

Drew Price, Grammarly Product Marketing Manager

Grammarly Insights FAQs

I’d also like to take this opportunity to provide some answers to common questions and misconceptions about these emails.

How do I earn badges?

Badges are earned through consecutive weeks of writing with Grammarly. This means you’ll have to use a Grammarly product (while logged in) at least once per week in order to keep your streak going. In order to give everyone a rich and rewarding experience, your counter will start fresh when we launch this new product, but we will not reset your streak count again unless you go an entire week without any activity.

Also, you will not have to re-earn badges. You’ll have access to a trophy case page of all of your past achievements. And, each weekly email will let you know how many weeks away your next badge is.

How is Productivity calculated?

Productivity is the total number of words checked by a Grammarly product while you were logged in for the previous week. In most cases, this is equivalent to the total number of words you typed.

However, there are a few corner cases that can cause inflation. Here’s the most common case: if you upload a document that you wrote before this week into the Grammarly Editor, Grammarly will check all of that text and add it to your total word count. It’s also possible that the Grammarly browser extension may check an active text window where you were not the original author of some of the words written. In other words, Grammarly will not be able to differentiate the original author in these cases.

How is Mastery calculated?

Mastery is a proxy for how accurate your writing was when you originally typed it. It is calculated using the following formula: (Number of alerts) / (Number of total words checked)

How is Vocabulary calculated?

Vocabulary is calculated based on the number of unique words that were checked. For example, if you used the word ‘Beautiful’ five times in a week, then it will count as one unique word. However, all five uses of the word will be counted in the Productivity section. This is why Productivity number will almost always be higher than Vocabulary number. (It is possible for you to have a tie if you don’t use any word more than once.)

Function words such as and and the are included in the Vocabulary calculation.

My numbers are different from what I expected!

Please see the above sections to make sure you are defining the metrics the same way we do. If you feel that there is a bug with the data, please report your concern to our Support team at support.grammarly.com.

Is my writing still private?

Yes! Grammarly cares immensely about the privacy and security of your data and personal information. We handle the Grammarly Insights emails with the same strict privacy standards as any other Grammarly feature or product.

You can see the specifics of our privacy policy here.

What is a “unique word”?

Please see the above explanation under “How is Vocabulary calculated?”

I’m too excited to wait for the next weekly email! How do I check my progress on the fly?

At this time, there are no other options for viewing your writing statistics. However, our product team is considering adding personal dashboards into the Grammarly Editor in the future.

Who can answer a question about my weekly stats?

Please send any casual thoughts or questions to @Grammarly on Twitter! If you have a bug to report, then please report your concern to our Support team.

14 Conversational Skills You Can Easily Learn and Apply at Work

Making Conversation at the Office

Making conversation at the office can be awkward. Stay all business and you risk coming across as a buttoned-up, stuffy person who doesn’t know how to cut loose. Too nice? You might find yourself taken for granted or even passed over for promotions. And if your conversations are too casual, you may find that you’re not taken seriously. How do you strike the perfect balance when making workday chat?

When it comes to office chatter, there are a few simple best practices you should observe.

1 Show interest in others. We naturally like people who are interested in us. Open conversations with a question, and then genuinely pay attention to the answer. A simple “How’s your day going?” goes a long way.

2 Respect your office culture. Casual banter and humor may not fly in a formal setting. Ditto for an overly serious attitude at a workplace that embraces a more casual tone. The office is one place where you want to fit in.

3 Keep your opinions about life outside the office to yourself. It’s cool if you let your co-workers know that you love your dog, or that you like to skydive on the weekends, but leave more charged topics like religion and politics alone.

4 Stay positive. Yes, bad things happen at work, but that doesn’t mean you have to have a negative mindset. Keep your tone positive by focusing on solutions instead of grumbling about problems.

5 Don’t gossip. Office gossip will almost always come back to haunt you. When someone shares private information with you, be sure to keep their confidence. And whatever you do, don’t badmouth management or your colleagues.

6 Listen and observe. Make it a rule to listen more often than you talk. The more insight you gain into your colleagues and the general vibe of your office environment, the more relevant and meaningful things you’ll have to say when it’s your turn to speak.

Chatting with Senior Colleagues

Conversing with office mates who share the same rung of the corporate ladder is one thing, but the dynamic changes when you’re talking to someone higher up. All of the tips we just provided are still in play (you weren’t really going to talk politics with your manager, were you?), but there are a few more you should observe to keep things professional.

7 To be interesting, be interested. Within reason. Dale Carnegie was right—the secret to being liked is to show an interest in others. But mind that you keep the topics professional. “How was your fishing trip?” is a great question. “Were you as drunk as you looked at the club this weekend?” . . . not so much.

8 Make conversation at the appropriate times. Chat with your senior colleagues when you know they’re not in a hurry, like when you’re both heading to grab a cup of coffee. Match the topic to the length of time at hand. Asking something like “How did you get into this field of work?” might be an appropriate conversation-starter at an office dinner function, but it’s not well-suited for a two-minute break at the water cooler.

9 Schedule time to discuss work-related topics. Have an idea for improving the quality of your social media analytics? Don’t present that during a thirty-second elevator ride. Instead, consider using email or other office channels to schedule a meeting. Otherwise, your ideas may get lost in the shuffle or, worse, you’ll come across as a pest.

10 Don’t kiss up. No one likes the colleague who’s doing everything short of jumping up and down, shouting “Look at me! Look at me!” to stay on the boss’s radar.

Communicating with Your Employees

Once more, the rules change a bit when you’re making conversation with someone you directly manage. Now you’re in a position where you need to command respect, and that applies even in casual settings. Here’s how.

11 Have a sense of humor. If it comes naturally, use humor to make yourself more approachable. Just keep it office-appropriate. Remember, you’re setting the tone for everyone else.

12 Bring others into your conversations. Even the most casual banter with a senior colleague can feel intimidating when it’s one-on-one. Consider inviting others into the mix to ease the tension and help everyone feel comfortable.

13 Don’t get too personal. Keep your chatty questions neutral. It’s fine to ask whether your employee had a nice time on vacation, but when you ask about their relationships with their significant others, you’re straying into personal territory. Would you feel comfortable answering if your employee asked you the same question?

14 Sincere compliments are always welcome. It’s helpful to praise individual performance-related wins that you might only mention cumulatively on a performance review. (“Good job on the presentation this morning! Your Powerpoint chops are becoming legendary.”) They can provide confidence boosts that increase morale.

Whatever your hierarchy in the office jungle, making conversation is a matter of applying a combination of empathy (chat like you’d like to be chatted to!), good observation skills, and a little common sense.

OMG, LOL!: 5 Communication Faux Pas You’re Making at Work

Is it okay to text in the office bathroom? Should you use emoticons in your cover letter? In this age of enhanced communication, it’s hard to avoid the occasional faux pas. Consider these five unfortunate souls whose poor communication etiquette undermined their professional authority.

Tia the Texter

Tia is a twenty-something working in a firm of baby boomers. She waltzes through life with her smartphone glued to her hand. At least, that’s how some of her superiors see it.

About 50 percent of Terri’s co-workers roll their eyes when she hunches over her phone, thumbs flying a mile a minute. Tia’s texting euphemisms occasionally cross over to her work emails. She’s been known to throw out an LOL, OMG, and �� from time to time.

Plenty of baby boomers text now, but not all of them do. To those elders still separated by the digital divide, Tia looks like a positive flake.

Larry, the Low Self Esteem Guy

Larry feels uncomfortable when a potential employer asks, “Why are you the best candidate for this position?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m the best,” he stumbles. “I’m a nice guy, but my conscience won’t allow me to say I’m the best. If you want the best, you should hire someone from Harvard. I went to community college, and I didn’t even get straight A’s.”

Sam Shelley, a bi-polar survivor and author of the book I Don’t Dwell recently wrote a blog post for LinkedIn about interviewing while suffering from low self-esteem. Shelley says, you must behave “as if . . . you are the best person for the job” at a job interview, even if you don’t believe it.

Natalie, the Negative Emailer

Natalie’s boss recently loaded her down with an overwhelming amount of work.

As deadlines approach, Natalie panics. Instead of asking her boss for help, she complains to her co-workers about how unfairly he treats her. Some of these complaints find their way into email threads. Before Natalie knows it, her laundry list of grievances inadvertently lands in the boss’s inbox.

Emailing your frustrations to co-workers might bring temporary relief, but you should save the venting for your online journal, the one you protect with an encrypted password. It’s the one your boss will never see.

Gina, the Generic Resume Writer

Gina’s resume perfectly fits the generic template she found on the Internet. She’s sent the document to hundreds of potential employers, but her phone never rings.

Nick Corcodilos, a veteran headhunter in Silicon Valley, knows why. “Resumes are a weak, passive way of getting in the door,” he says. Instead of sending out resumes that look just like everyone else’s, Gina should craft a document that illustrates how she could improve life for a potential employer.

Corcodilos is talking about a pain letter, a type of cover letter in which potential hires explain how they could solve company problems. To write a persuasive pain letter, job seekers should place themselves in the shoes of the employer. Gina’s not a bad worker. She just needs a platform through which she can sell herself.

Connie, the Comma Criminal

Connie is a comma criminal. She admits that she doesn’t understand comma rules. She also admits that, in her mind, comma rules just aren’t that important.

Connie’s supervisor begs to differ. Run-on sentences make him cringe. If he gets another “Hey George good morning are we meeting in the board room at eight,” he’ll either go crazy or shell out the tuition for Connie’s enrollment in Remedial English 101.

Technology blurs the lines between our personal and professional lives. As we have seen, well-meaning people make embarrassing, funny, and horrendous communication mistakes all the time. Have you ever worked with a Tia, Larry, Natalie, Gina, or Connie?

Toward or Towards

• Toward and towards are two acceptable ways of spelling the same preposition.
• Toward is the preferred spelling in the United States and Canada.
• Towards is the preferred spelling in the United Kingdom and Australia.

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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.

Toward vs. 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.

Examples of Toward and Towards

I believe it is our generational responsibility to take action, and Canada will continue working toward an ambitious agreement in Kigali.

The Huffington Post Canada

BlackRock Inc., the world’s biggest money manager, said investors should be wary of Treasuries as the Federal Reserve moves toward raising interest rates.

Bloomberg

The divide still exists; some remain bitter towards Cruyff and towards Guardiola, his most determined disciple.

The Guardian

Top International Productivity Books

As a company striving to make people more productive and successful, we know a thing or two about the importance of having the right tools when there’s a job to be done. But even though Grammarly will help speed up your proofreading, you also need to know how to manage your time if you want to be more productive. That means prioritizing and fighting the urge to procrastinate. Our product can’t teach you those skills, but we can recommend some books that might help.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey

How good does a productivity book have to be to catch the eye of a US president and prompt him to ask the writer to help implement its principles at the White House? Pretty darn good! During his presidency, Bill Clinton once invited Stephen R. Covey to help him and his staff learn to implement the principles in the book. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People has become one of the best-known personal effectiveness books for good reason. You don’t need to have a developed set of skills to adopt the seven habits mentioned in the title. You need to have certain principles, such as fairness and honesty, and use them to build the habits that will help you transition from being dependent to being independent, and from being independent into being interdependent. According to Covey, that’s where real effectiveness lies.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Do you know that feeling when you’re extremely focused on a task and everything around you sort of fades away, and you’re doing great work and feeling good about it? That feeling we like to call “being in the zone?” Well, that’s something Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a major figure in positive psychology, calls optimal experience or flow. In the book Flow, Csikszentmihalyi sets out to explain what flow is, how it works, and what the requirements of getting into it are. While it’s relatively easy to see how mastering the state of flow can make you more productive because it has an emotional component to it, being in the flow can also make you feel happier while your productivity is up. Can you think of a better reason for reading a book?

Eat that Frog! by Brian Tracy

If you’re not very keen on the idea of eating frogs, don’t worry—Brian Tracy’s book Eat that Frog! won’t make you do it. But there is a saying about how eating a frog early in the morning makes everything bad that might happen to you during the day not as bad. The point here is to tackle the biggest, baddest and most off-putting tasks first. That’s one of strategies Tracy offers to help procrastinators get things done. There are twenty more of these methods described in the book, and all of them are very practical and just waiting for you to implement.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen

David Allen is a person you should listen to when it comes to productivity. His book Getting Things Done was first published in 2001. In 2015, he revised it to incorporate modern tech advancements. It has become more than just a book of advice—it’s a productivity method, known by the acronym GTD. Allen’s bestseller is a mix of guidance and principles based on the central premise that the more relaxed you are, the more productive you will be. So, if you want to tie your productivity to being relaxed, GTD will teach you to do it. It will give you all the tools necessary. But bear in mind, GTD has a reputation for being complicated to understand and implement, so dive in only if you think you can handle it.

Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better by Adam Pash and Gina Trapani

So far, the books on this list have offered universal principles—getting into the flow, tackling procrastination, and developing a productivity mindset. It only makes sense to end the list with a book that will help you be more productive in the digital environment : Adam Pash and Gina Trapani’s “Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better.” The book is a compilation of blog posts featured on Lifehacker.com, a website dedicated to software and personal productivity. If you’re not tech-savvy and you want to know what’s out there to help you with your productivity issues, this book will show you. But it will also help you rein in all that tech when it starts taking up too much of your time.

Spotlight: How Khan Academy Is Transforming Education

In mathematical language, a transformation changes a form without changing its value. If that doesn’t mean much to you, let Sal explain it to you in a short video complete with examples and diagrams. Salman (Sal) Khan is the founder of Khan Academy, an online academy that offers math, science, art, and other courses free of charge. Though there are no English grammar classes yet, students seeking to sharpen their skills can still benefit from the academy’s offerings.

Test Prep

Khan Academy helps prepare students to take many of the standardized exams required for higher education in the United States. One of these exams, the SAT, assesses “academic readiness for college” and tests students’ reading and writing skills. Anyone, even those not taking the test, can benefit from the videos, exercises, and full-length practice exams offered by Khan Academy in partnership with the College Board, the creators of the SAT. In one video, Sal addresses a sample question from the grammar section of the writing exam. In less than two minutes, he shows how to pick out the essential information to decide if the sentence is grammatically correct or requires modification. Students are no longer limited to preparing for the SAT by taking a paper sample exam and checking their answers with a key. With Sal’s videos, they learn why a particular answer is the correct one and the process that Sal followed to arrive at the right conclusion.

Admissions Essays

One of the most intimidating aspects of applying to a college can be the admissions essay. Khan Academy features a twelve-video series to help students write essays with confidence. The series opens with videos about how to write compelling essays, mistakes to avoid, how to brainstorm, and how to “take your college essay to the next level.” Actual admissions officers give feedback on sample essays in two videos. The series closes with writing tips and real-life stories from student applicants. One student commented, “This really helped. I was working on an essay as I read it. I made some changes based on this article.” For this student, Khan Academy was like a writing coach that guided him during the creative process.

Language Advocates

One of Khan Academy’s missions is to offer free education “for everyone.” Language advocates are a huge part of making this possible. Advocates are volunteers who translate Sal’s videos into their native languages or caption the videos with subtitles so that people the world over can enjoy the valuable lessons. Translators gain professional experience while helping an important cause. Rumor has it that Khan Academy plans to add English to its course catalog. Volunteers to review new grammar content, such as articles, quizzes, and videos, are signing up now.

Khan Academy is a nonprofit organization focused on making education accessible to all students. Did you learn what a transformation means in mathematical language from Sal’s video? Video technology and the Internet are now making it possible to share quality education with a wider scope of students. Like Room to Read, Khan Academy is changing how students in poor or remote areas receive their education. What other noteworthy nonprofit is impacting the educational community? Please check back next month to find out.