Celebrities on Twitter: Who makes more mistakes?

Grammarly recently compiled a list of the 25 most recent tweets from each of the top 150+ celebrities on Twitter, based on number of followers. Our team of proofreaders then corrected these tweets for spelling and grammar errors. Here’s a general overview of what we found:

• Female celebrities make fewer overall writing errors (11.1 mistakes per 100 words) than male celebrities (13.0 mistakes per 100 words) on Twitter
• Musicians are the worst writers in any category of celebrity, including politician, actor, athlete, and business leader, with an average of 14.5 mistakes per 100 words.
• Unsurprisingly, writers are the most accurate writers among all celebrities, with an average of 6.9 mistakes per 100 words
• The accuracy of a celebrity’s grammar correlates directly with that person’s age — younger celebrities make more grammar mistakes than older celebrities
• Celebrities who are older than 40 years old make more spelling mistakes (5.5 mistakes per 100 words) than celebrities who are younger than 40 years old (2.7 mistakes per 100 words)

We’ve summarized our findings using this handy infographic:

Female celebrities make fewer overall writing errors, musicians are the worst writers in any category of celebrity…

To embed it into a blog post, paste the following HTML snippet into your web editor:

8 Weird Techniques to Beat Writer’s Block

You’ve already taken ten deep breaths, made coffee, gone on a walk, had a snooze, made more coffee, looked at colossal lists of inspiring ideas, and made another cup of coffee for good measure. It’s time to break out the big guns—er, pens.

Everyone has their way to push through mental blocks and get things done . . . but what are the weirdest strategies? Here are eight odd but useful ways to reset your brain.

1 Shake up your routine.

Write at a different time. Go to a new coffee shop, or sit in the park. Go to a movie in the middle of the day. If you usually write on a computer, try pencils. Or colored pencils!

2 Use your five senses.

Listen to weird music. (Try these Kurdish disco beats. Or this Russian waltz). Go to a bakery and inhale—or if you’re feeling adventurous, stick your head in the dumpster out behind the grocery store. Put your hands on a pineapple. Eat it—or eat a squid tentacle. Watch a movie or TV show you haven’t seen, or better yet, go sit somewhere new and watch the people who go by. Really watch, and make up their stories as you do.

3 Cry your heart out.

On paper, that is. And preferably with words, not tears.

Write down all the things you don’t like about your writing. List the problems with the piece you’re working on. Scribble down what you don’t like about when you can’t write. Tally all your fears, dislikes, complaints, and concerns. Basically, this is your permission to have an uninterrupted gripe fest on paper until you run out of complaints.

The trick: you will run out of complaints. Once you express all that negativity, you’ll find it seeping away. It may not solve your writer’s block completely, but it should make you feel a bit better about picking up the pen (or keyboard) moving forward.

4 Do something you haven’t done since you were a kid.

Grab a jump rope and get the blood flowing. Go to the park and kick a kid off the swings (actually, leave the kids alone. But swinging is fun).

Or do something you’ve never done that kids do: play paintball, or laser tag, do a funny dance, or, if you can recruit some teammates, kickball or capture the flag. Okay, fine—videogames count, but don’t get sucked in. Sporty games are best because the resulting endorphin boost can get you in a better writing mood, but picking an unusual activity of any kind can help your imagination move into spaces you wouldn’t have expected.

5 Start a conversation with a stranger.

If it’s interesting and you can use it as writing fuel, awesome! You win.

If it isn’t, write five ways it could have gone differently. What could you have said to veer the conversation in a certain direction? What if you’d become besties? What if you secretly shared a long-lost uncle? What if you became a duo of crime-fighting, demon-slaying superheroes?

6 Get an imaginary friend.

No stranger handy? No problem.

Create an imaginary person to talk to who loves everything you ever write. If you’re a creative type, you can give your new buddy a name, personality, even pick a photo or a doodle that looks like the person (or llama, or dinosaur) you want to talk to.

If that’s taking it a bit too far, you can still play the imagination game with a nameless invisible buddy. Write out a conversation, or scribble a letter to your friend. If you’re not ready to let them know about your writing issues, invent some challenges for your friend and talk those out. It’s an exercise that will get you out of your negative, blocked headspace, and if your friend is a true fan, it can help you see the good in your writing and move past the blockage.

And don’t worry: being a grown-up with an imaginary friend doesn’t make you crazy. If you start liking your friend more than everyone else around you, then we’ll talk.

7 Create a reward system for yourself, and break it.

Write for thirty minutes (or two pages, or 500 words—set your milestone) and give yourself a prize. Gummy bears. Coffee. Your favorite game app.

Already have a reward system and still have writer’s block? Binge on rewards. Have two ice cream sundaes, or play your Scrabble app for two hours straight. After that, you’ll probably be dying to do something productive.

8 Say hey to the cliché.

If you’re not in the mood to dance around to Kurdish music like a maniac or talk to your invisible bestie like—well, a maniac, go back to the tried-and-true methods of fighting writer’s block. Take a break, or a nap. Make lists of inspiring ideas. Read lists of inspiring ideas. Freewrite until a good idea comes along. Stare at a wall (or preferably, nature). And there’s always coffee.

There’s no surefire way of beating writer’s block, but by being creative in your approach to brain drain, you might find just yourself quicker to get your brain back on track.

Mistake of the Month—Unnecessary Modifiers

As Mark Twain once wrote, “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”

Unnecessary modifiers make your writing weak and bloated, burying your message in a deluge of quites and rathers. These modifiers add no value to the sentences in which they appear. The first step to fixing the problem is identifying the filler words in your writing.

These words, also called intensifiers or qualifiers, are almost always adverbs. Here’s a list of the most commonly abused modifiers:

• Actually
• Really
• Basically
• Probably
• Very
• Definitely
• Somewhat
• Kind of
• Extremely
• Practically

So why are they so bad? We use these words constantly, peppering our everyday speech with them so often that they cease to have any meaning, becoming transparent. In written communication, these modifiers take up valuable space. In a world where readers’ attention spans are growing shorter by the day, getting to the point as quickly and concisely as possible is essential. For additional tips on making your writing more concise, check out the always-helpful Purdue Online Writing Lab.

Beyond trimming the fat from your writing, “weasel” words like somewhat andkind of dilute your message. That’s great if you’re trying to spare a friend’s feelings—“Your one-man mariachi band kind of needs some work, Steve”—but not if you’re trying to make a strong point in business or academic writing. Don’t equivocate; get straight to the point and make it without hedging.

The best and easiest way to get rid of unnecessary modifiers is not to use them in the first place. However, if your existing work needs to be pared down, read each line and evaluate it for wordiness. More often than not, your sentences will be just fine without these modifiers. Unfortunately, you’ll need to approach them on a case-by-case basis, since sometimes the modifiers do change the meaning of your sentence. Let’s take a look as some examples:

Example: It was a very hot day in Albuquerque.

In this example, the word very does indicate an increased degree of heat, but is the sentence “It was a hot day in Albuquerque,” truly have a significantly different meaning? It can safely be cut.

Example: She was actually a robot.

In the sentence above, actually indicates that her identity as a robot is something of a surprise. Keep it.

Example: We’re really going to regret this in the morning.

Here, really is used as an intensifier, showing the degree to which they’re going to regret whatever it is. However, “We’re going to regret this in the morning” means the same thing. Cut it.

Example: I am definitely going to take a vacation this Christmas.

The word definitely adds nothing of value to this sentence—“I am definitely going” and “I am going” mean the same thing—but depending on the tone of the piece, it may be appropriate to leave in.

When trying to capture a character’s voice in fiction or in writing a casual email, feel free to modify away. However, more formal settings require more precise language. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Writing Center has a great primer on how to tighten up your writing.

Which of these unnecessary modifiers to you use most often in your writing? Get out your red pen and be ruthless!

Conditional Verbs

Conditional verbs are used to create conditional sentences, which express hypothetical or unlikely situations. Conditional verbs can be used in the past, present, or future tense, and auxiliary verbs like can/could, will/would, and may/might are important in forming conditionals.

Consider the following conditional sentences, and pay close attention to the conditional verbs in each of them:

If my cousin had been just a little taller, he could have been a basketball player.

If I had enough money, I would travel around the world.

If Alex finishes his essay, he will come over tomorrow.

What Are Your Subject Line Pet Peeves?

Imply vs. Infer—What’s the Difference?

• Imply means to suggest or to say something in an indirect way.
• Infer means to suppose or come to a conclusion, especially based on an indirect suggestion.

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Implying and inferring are both common elements of communication. One means to state something, and the other to conclude something. But it’s surprisingly easy to confuse these two verbs.

What Does Imply Mean?

When we imply something, we’re hinting at what we mean but not saying it directly:

I didn’t mean to imply that your grasp on grammar is bad.

He didn’t make any promises, but he did imply that he’d be back for the holidays.

What Does Infer Mean?

When you come to a conclusion based on something you think someone implied, you’re inferring:

Am I right to infer that you think my grammar is bad?

We inferred that he’d be back before the holidays because he didn’t leave with enough luggage for a long trip.

Examples

Even at face value, well-intentioned repairs surely imply why repairs were necessary.

Chicago Tribune

But the inclusion of the term “migration” was not meant to imply a general federal power to restrict migration, but was a euphemism intended to bolster the pretense that the Constitution did not endorse slavery.

The Washington Post

Current technology uses radars on satellites to infer wind speeds, and both sending and receiving these signals is a more costly process.

NBC-2

You can probably infer from its R18 rating that Verhoeven doesn’t shy away from the sexual violence aspects of the narrative, and the film’s repeated flashbacks to the assault seem a little gratuitous.

Stuff

Parallel Structure and Prepositions

When prepositional phrases are used in a parallel series, prepositions (with, to, of, over, under, by, etc.) should be repeated with every element of the series unless all elements use the same preposition. A common error is to repeat prepositions unnecessarily, resulting in a stilted style.

I am making a stew with beef, with carrots, and with onions.

In this sentence, there are three prepositional phrases complementing I am making a stew. If written separately and not in a single, parallel structure, they would read:

I am making a stew with beef. I am making a stew with carrots. I am making a stew with onions.

When combining these elements into a single sentence, there is no need to repeat the preposition with because it is used identically for each element.

I am making a stew with beef, carrots, and onions.

Writing the sentence this way ensures a clear, uncluttered style.

What to Avoid: Mixing Prepositions in a Parallel Structure

Mixing prepositions improperly in a parallel structure is a common writing mistake. If a writer allows multiple phrases to share a preposition and then introduces a different preposition with another element, the result is a clumsy sentence.

The baby flung spaghetti strands on the walls, the counters, and under the table.

If we separate the elements of this sentence, we have:

The baby flung spaghetti strands on the walls. The baby flung spaghetti strands on the counters. The baby flung spaghetti strands under the table.

The first two elements require the preposition on, but the last element requires the preposition under. Therefore, it is necessary to repeat all three prepositions when combining the elements into a parallel sentence structure.

The baby flung spaghetti strands on the walls, on the counters, and under the table.