Where to Find The Answers to Your Grammar Questions

How the Grammar Girl Team Answers All Those Grammar Questions

Guest post by Ashley Dodge

English is a complex, complicated, and often confusing language. It seems as if everyone, at one time or another, needs help with grammar. As Grammar Girl’s assistant, I’m lucky enough to help people find the answers to their grammar questions sent in by e-mail, whether it’s how to remember “affect” or “effect,” or how to use the semicolon.

We get a lot of the same grammar questions, and we also get tons of tips and podcast ideas straight from the e-mail we receive. Mignon and I work as a team to make sure we provide the right, or best, answers to people’s questions, and whenever I run into a particularly challenging or difficult question, I send it to Mignon.

Sometimes, however, there isn’t an answer. This is frustrating not only for me, but for the person who asked the question. A popular and frustrating question people ask is why we say “the Eiffel Tower,” but we don’t say, “the Buckingham Palace,” or why we say “I’m going to church,” but not “I’m going to museum.”

This is frustrating because we can tell you the answer to your specific question, and we can give you some guidelines about when to use determiners (“a,” “the”), but we can’t answer the question people want, which is “Why? Why do you need a determiner with countable singular nouns but not proper nouns?” Often people want the answer to that “Why?” question, and there isn’t one. It’s just one of the many examples of English’s complexity, complications, and confusion.

To support or find my answers to grammar e-mail, I start with Grammar Girl, of course! I search the Grammar Girl website, newsletters, and books. If I can’t find what I’m looking for in any of those sources, I do a Google search; search the dictionary; look through Garner’s Modern American Usage, the Chicago Manual of Style, the AP Stylebook, grammar blogs, books, or websites such as Grammarly; or search Google Ngram, which shows how often words or phrases are used in published books.

The latter source is fascinating and many people don’t know it exists. Grammar Girl has written about it, and when I use Google Ngram to support or find my answer, this is usually the first time people have heard of it.

You might think responding to grammar questions would be easy, but sometimes it’s difficult to craft a polite response to someone who, let’s say, has had an ongoing debate about a specific grammar issue, and the side the writer has chosen is wrong. People don’t like to hear that they’re wrong or are going to lose a bet. I always try to keep a friendly, conversational tone. Mignon wants to provide a comfortable, supportive, and friendly place where you don’t have to worry about us making a comment if you make a grammar mistake. That’s what I try to create.

What’s the best part about answering grammar e-mail? It’s rewarding to know you’re helping people. I find that I’ve learned more myself about grammar, language, usage, and writing just by answering people’s questions.

About the Author

Ashley Dodge is Grammar Girl’s assistant, and a writer, social media manager, and lifestyle blogger. She lives in Reno, Nevada where she graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.  She enjoys knitting hats and having her pug model them. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram, and visit her blog.

You can follow Grammar Girl on Facebook and Twitter, and head to the Quick and Dirty Tips website to sign up for the weekly Grammar Girl newsletter, podcast, and tips.

What are we grateful for? Commas.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, the Grammarly team polled more than 1,700 Facebook fans on what piece of punctuation they are most “thankful” for in their writing.

The semi-colon, em-dash, and period, were top contenders; yet, overwhelmingly we learned that English writers are most thankful for the comma.

Although writers enjoy the comma, many do not know how to use it. Misuse of commas is among the top grammar mistakes that writers around the world are making, according to a recent audit of English writers conducted by the Grammarly team. And there are many ways to misuse a comma:

• Not including a comma before a coordinating conjunction (makes up 43 percent of all comma mistakes among Grammarly users)
• Comma misuse in an introductory phrase (8 percent of comma mistakes)
• Comma misuse inside a compound subject (7 percent of comma mistakes)
• Comma misuse around interrupters (6 percent of comma mistakes)

There are 28 different types of comma mistakes that English writers can make. Yet, not including a comma before a coordinating conjunction—and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet—is six times more common than any other!

Is textspeak a second language?

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.

How to Silence Your Internal Editor

I just wrote this sentence three times—twice to change the direction of my opening monologue, and once to fix some structural errors. I did all that picking and all those rewrites before I even wrote another sentence. It took me about five minutes.

Why did I fiddle so long with one sentence? I have a hard time getting my internal editor to quiet down, so I developed the habit of self-editing as I write. Yes, I eventually got the result I wanted, but it took more time than necessary and my writing ground to a halt while I was doing it. If picking at your writing sentence-by-sentence before you’ve even finished a first draft slows you down and makes you feel less creative, you may want to break the habit. You’ll not only stay more productive, but you’ll keep in the flow so you don’t lose a single bit of inspiration.

Of a number of scribes I hobnob with, I have only one writer friend who doesn’t complain about being unable to get out of her head and just get the words down. (She’s also very prolific. Make of that what you will.) Many of us, when we sit down to write, hear the voice of an inner critic rattling around inside our heads. My voice is so familiar and persistent that I’ve named him the editor demon—Ed for short. But just because I’ve given him a nickname doesn’t mean I think he’s cute. Quite the contrary, sometimes I wish he’d just shut up and let me write.

How do we muzzle our internal editors long enough to get some writing done? Many writers will tell you it’s a lifelong struggle. But there are a few techniques you can try to help you stay in the writing zone and leave editing for later.

Empty your brain closet

Part of learning to get along with Ed (you can name your editor demon Phil or Susan or whatever you like, but for continuity’s sake I’ll stick with Ed) comes with embracing the knowledge that first drafts are inherently messy.

Think of your brain in terms of a cluttered closet. You can’t find anything you’re looking for, but you know it’s in there somewhere. What’s the first step to cleaning out a closet? You take everything out and dump it someplace where you can go through it, scrap what’s not useful, sort what is, and put everything back in a logical order, tidying as you go.

The drafting process is the act of emptying your mental closet into a big, messy, jumbled pile. Only after you take inventory of everything you have can you actually start assembling your thoughts into something that makes sense and reads cleanly. So, whenever you catch Ed nagging you as you’re dumping words onto the page in your first draft, stop him. Remind him that you’ve got to get everything out of your brain closet first before you can tidy it all up. Then get back to writing.

Use a little CBT

CBT stands for cognitive behavior therapy, a rather broad term for certain behavior recognition and modification techniques used in psychological therapy. But you don’t have to be in therapy to put the power of CBT strategies to work for you. All it involves is the ability to recognize when you’re being too critical of your performance. Then, when you catch your inner critic giving you a hard time, you employ a little positive and rational self talk to get your mind back on track.

Let’s say you’re working on a piece of fiction and Ed simply won’t stop interrupting your writing jam to pick apart your work. He tells you that your writing is bad, and that you need to go back to fix it before you can carry on. Here’s how you might use CBT to silence his nagging voice.

Unhelpful thoughts

This first draft sucks—nothing is going right! My writing is horrible and I’m just spinning my wheels. I should give up.

Positive self talk

First drafts are born to be bad! Your writing isn’t horrible, it just needs polishing. You’ll edit later and everything will fall into place. Don’t give up. You’ve got this!

It sounds simplistic, but it works. Self-compassion has proven to be a more effective learning tool than self-criticism, but too often, we let our inner critics get away with bullying us. Would you critique a dear friend by telling him his first draft sucks? Of course you wouldn’t; you’d make a point of giving constructive feedback. Treat yourself with the same care and respect. You deserve it!

Mistakes make you smarter

A teacher of mine always said, “If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning.” She was right, too. When we treat our mistakes as a learning tool—that “teachable moment” you’re always hearing about in corporate culture—you’re more likely to grow and improve. People who think that success comes through hard work and dedicated practice are more likely to learn from their mistakes than those who think talent is innate and you either have it or you don’t.

When you’re being too self-critical, remind yourself that every mistake you make is an opportunity to learn. Brush Ed off your shoulder and tell him, “Quiet! I’m learning here.” Then, continue dumping that jumble of stuff into your draft, making glorious mistakes, confident in the knowledge that you’ll clean everything up when you’re done, and you’ll learn something in the process.

Respect your process

Self-editing as you write isn’t always bad, especially if you’ve learned not to be negative about it. If you’re capable of fixing your writing on the fly without beating yourself up, it could be that you’ve developed a level of comfort and competency that allows self-editing to work for you. Although it took me a while to write that all-important first sentence, once it was out of the way the rest of my article flowed smoothly, with a little editing here and there as I went. Better yet, when I was finished, all I needed was a quick proofreading pass and I was done. If you’re the sort of person who can edit as you write without feeling frustrated and creatively stifled, then go ahead and enjoy your writing superpower.

But Ed isn’t always welcome at my deskside. Sometimes, particularly when you’re digging into more emotional writing such as fiction or poetry, you don’t want to be interrupted by a pesky editor demon telling you that you’ve got to fix that typo or rework that sentence structure right now. When Ed won’t stop his endless critical chatter, just use the techniques I mentioned here. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and remind yourself that mistakes are part of writing a first draft. Now, write on! You’ve got this.

Proofreading Tips for a More Productive 2016

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re either a writer or a person who frequently comes into contact with the written word. You might be a journalist who writes articles, a blogger who writes blog posts, a student who writes term papers, or an activist who writes grant proposals. As long as your life includes at least an occasional putting of a pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, you know how important it is to proofread everything you write. You also probably know how tough it can be sometimes.

There’s a great article on Wired explaining why catching your own mistakes is such a challenging task. The fact that your brain is responsible for both the writing and the proofreading works against you, as does the tendency to simultaneously look for errors in spelling, grammar, and meaning. Still, people find ways to do it, and with a little help from only five tips, you will too.

1 Get All the Help You Can Every good word processor has an integrated spelling checker, and you shouldn’t be afraid to use it. Better yet, you can enlist the help of specialized proofreading software. You can’t rely on these tools completely because they might not have the proofreading capabilities of a human. But some tools get close. Ours does, and we’re not saying it because we want to sing our own praises. It’s just a statement of fact.

2 Go Into Proofreading Prepared When Roy Peter Clark suggests something, writers around the world take heed. When he says you should keep a list of the most common language errors you are prone to making, you should create it right away. The list might be helpful in the process of writing, but in the process of proofreading, it’s invaluable. It’s the kind of list that’s populated with “to” and “too,” “there,” “their,” and “they’re,” and similar errors.

Having a broader checklist of specific errors to look for in a text is also recommended. Parallelisms, split infinitives, grammar, and sentence structure issues should all be a part of a checklist you should go through every time you proofread. If you don’t want to develop one on your own, you can find great ones online.

3 Trick Your Brain We tend to be better at proofreading texts we are familiar with, as opposed to texts we see for the first time. However, the kind of familiarity you get when you read something once or twice before proofreading it and the kind of familiarity you get when you create your own text are not the same. The former is beneficial and the latter is not, so you need to trick your brain into the sweet spot of familiarity when you want to proofread your own work.

There are a couple of things you can do. First, put some temporal distance between the acts of writing and proofreading. Second, proofread a hard copy instead of a computer file, if you can. Either way, change the font, the size of the letters, even the number of columns in your text. Change the color of the letters. Whatever you need to do to make it look and feel different, do it.

4 Read Out Loud Reading out loud can actually increase the accuracy of your proofreading. Try reading the text in silence first, especially if you’re not reading your own work, and then reading it once more out loud.

5 Divide and Conquer You can’t take a text and proofread it in only one pass. Well, you can, but the results won’t be that good. You should do a few passes instead, each time concentrating on one specific thing. Here’s an example: First, make sure the editing process is completed and that there are no issues with clarity, style, or structure. It’s rarely a good idea to proofread and edit at the same time, as you’ll probably get a poorly edited, poorly proofread text in the end.

Start with reading the text, out loud, as mentioned in the previous tip. That will help you catch some errors, such as missing or double words. Get your list of common mistakes and check for them in the text. Follow that with a grammar check. If you followed tip number two, you probably have a list of things you need to check—things like grammar issues related to the use of verbs and pronouns, for example. So you check your text for those issues. While you’re at it, you can check sentence structures for errors. Next, move on to checking punctuation. You can highlight each punctuation mark in the text, look at it carefully, determine whether you need it or not, whether it’s placed correctly, and whether it should be replaced with another punctuation mark.

Finally, check the spelling. One of the best ways to do that is to read the text backward, word by word. That way, you will minimize the chances of your brain processing the whole sentence instead of a single word, so start with the very last word in the text, and move to the left and upward until you reach the first word. By the time you’ve done it, you’ll have an error-free text in front of you and the whole of 2016 to reap the benefits of knowing how to proofread efficiently and effectively. Have a good one!

Writers, Get Ready for NaNoWriMo!

Every November, wordsmiths around the globe take on the ultimate writing challenge—to crank out a 50,000-word novel in just thirty days. The event is called NaNoWriMo (an acronym for National Novel Writing Month), and last year it drew 431,626 participants. Although the format is meant to encourage quick, seat-of-your-pants writing, the words writers churn out during the annual event aren’t necessarily for naught. So far, over 250 NaNoWriMo novels, including Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants and Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus, have been published by traditional book publishers.

It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this!

Are you planning to write a novel in November? Although NaNoWriMo challenges writers to write hard and fast without stopping to edit or check grammar, that doesn’t mean you have to set out unprepared. The Grammarly team thought it would be fun to arm you with some writing tips and words of encouragement so you’ll be well prepared for your adventure. During the month of October, we’ll share a series of writing advice articles to get you geared up and ready to tell your tale.

NaNoWriMo Prep: Week 1

How do you get ideas for a story? Cultivate curiosity!

It’s possible that you’re thinking about writing a novel in November and you still haven’t decided what to write about. Now is the perfect time to start planting the seeds of ideas and seeing what will take root. But how do you find those idea seeds? By cultivating curiosity.

Every child’s curiosity has gotten her into trouble at one point or another. It starts by thinking: what would happen if I did X? What would happen if I touched that hot stovetop? What would happen if I set my goldfish free? What would happen if I jumped from the top of the stairs? Would I fly? Fortunately, with age comes common sense—we stop burning our fingers, sending our goldfish to the sewers, and fracturing our tibias trying to feed our curiosity. Unfortunately, those painful lessons—not to mention nagging parents and teachers—cause us not only to stop trying to answer silly questions but to stop asking them in the first place.

This month, start asking silly questions again. (Don’t jump! Answer that “would I fly” question in writing, please.) No one writes well in a vacuum, so challenge yourself to get out and observe humans in their natural (and unnatural) habitats. Go to a park, a concert, a political rally, anywhere you can people-watch, and then start asking questions. That sad-looking man in a business suit sitting on the park bench with a newspaper in one hand and a brown paper bag in the other—what’s his story? Why does he look so sad? Has he suffered a loss? What kind of loss? Was it his job? His wife? Millions of dollars in the stock market? What’s in the brown paper bag? Is it something that will complicate things for him? What would happen if he slept on the park bench tonight?

While you’re out on your field trip, carry a small notebook so you can write down what you observe and ask all the silly questions you want. Note the sounds you hear, the smells, the sights. But most of all, notice people and start asking yourself what their stories might be and what would happen if . . . You don’t have to have real answers—create them!

Be “curioser and curioser.”

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). ―Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Now that you’ve got notes, it’s time to think about whose story you might want to tell. While you were out, which people intrigued you and made you ask the most questions? Make up names for them. Make up pasts. Make up character profiles (here’s a fun worksheet) about their likes and dislikes, their bad habits, and their biggest flaws—the things that will really get them into trouble. All fiction evolves from getting characters into trouble and then testing those characters as they work their way through it to come out on the other side a changed person. (More on this in a future article.)

Does one of the characters you invented stand out and make you eager to learn more? Does one of them keep popping up in your daydreams or keep you lying awake long after you should be asleep? That’s the one you want to write 50,000 words about come November. Let him or her rattle around in your head for a while and become real.

3 Works to Celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.

In President Obama’s final State of the Union address, he included a call on Americans to use their “voices of unarmed truth and unconditional love,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called them. Dr. King’s legacy lives on not only in Obama’s speech but also in the minds and hearts of Americans as we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day on the third Monday of January each year. The following three books are touching reminders of the life of this exceptional activist, humanitarian, and civil rights leader.

I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World by Martin Luther King Jr.

This book collects what Coretta Scott King described as “many of what I consider to be my husband’s most important writings and orations.” Among the pieces in the book are “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the essay “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” and his last sermon, “I See the Promised Land.” The sections are ordered chronologically to follow the history of the civil rights movement and other events. The introduction is by James M. Washington, the editor of the book.

Strength to Love by Martin Luther King Jr.

Strength to Love is a collection of Dr. King’s sermons about his philosophy of nonviolence, his vision of Christianity, and his sense of social justice. Coretta Scott King wrote the foreword, saying, “If there is one book Martin Luther King Jr. has written that people consistently tell me has changed their lives, it is Strength to Love.”

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Clayborne Carson (Editor)

This first-person account of Dr. King’s life is woven from collections of unpublished writings, interviews, and correspondence from Stanford University’s collection of archival material. Clayborne Carson, a historian and documentarian, compiled these materials into a book that supplements Dr. King’s other autobiographies Stride Toward Freedom and Where Do We Go From Here. Carson’s book takes readers from Dr. King’s birth in Atlanta in 1929 through his entire life story and illustrates the moral courage that sustained him through the most difficult times.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day gives us the opportunity to reflect on the great courage of this iconic leader. Some may only know him as the leader of the civil rights movement, but reading his works gives us insight into his beliefs and the passion that guided his life.