What Kind of Writing Do You Use at the Office?

Persons vs. People vs. Peoples—What’s the Difference?

Most of the time, people is the correct word to choose as a plural for person. Persons is archaic, and it is safe to avoid using it, except in legal writing, which has its own traditional language. Peoples is only necessary when you refer to distinct ethnic groups (for example, within the same region).

“People” vs. “Persons” as Plurals

Person and people both derive from Latin, but from different words. Person came from persona, which first meant “mask,” like that worn by an actor, but eventually came to mean “an individual human.” People, on the other hand, came from populus, which means “the people” in the sense of a group from the same nation, community, or ethnic group.

There was a time in history when it was put forward that grammatically, persons should be the preferred plural any time more than one person was referred to as a countable noun, and people should be preferred for uncountable nouns. That practice did not become standard, and nowadays, the plural persons is only considered correct in legal contexts and, occasionally, when deliberately referring to humans individually rather than collectively.

Eighty people came to my Star Wars costume party on May the fourth.

Six persons came dressed as either Princess Leia or Darth Vader, but the rest of the people were all wookies. (Acceptable because the persons’ individual choices are relevant to the context.)

Six people came dressed as either Princess Leia or Darth Vader, but the rest of the people were all wookies. (Equally acceptable)

More people should recycle their paper to save trees.

Why don’t more people realize that capybaras are rodents?

Sixteen people protested on the White House lawn this Saturday.

”Persons” or “People” in Formal Legal Writing

In the legal world, including law enforcement, persons is used regularly. It is helpful because nothing is collective where the law is concerned; individuals are prosecuted, not groups. Some legal expressions, such as persons of interest and missing persons, reflect this grammatical preference. Some people use persons in writing that is legal-sounding, but not strictly legal by definition, such as rules and public notices.

Any person or persons vandalizing courthouse property will be fined.

There are two persons of interest being questioned for the murder of John Doe.

The Douglas County Police Department has seventeen open missing persons cases.

No more than six persons can occupy the hot tub at any one time.

One political context in which persons is correct is in the expression displaced persons.

Visas will be expedited for refugees and displaced persons.

Using persons outside of legal contexts can sound unnecessarily affected. Avoid it completely in business contexts.

To the persons who stole my muffins from the break room: I will be avenged. (A bit silly, given the offense.)

Persons who retain our services will be charged a monthly fee.

Those who retain our services will be charged a monthly fee.

“People” vs. “Peoples” for Ethnic Groups and Nationalities

When you refer to the people of a single ethnic group or nationality, always use the word people.

The people of China no longer need to abide by the one-child policy.

Emmanuel Macron was elected by the people of France on May 7, 2017.

“We here highly resolve that government of the people, for the people, and by the people will not perish from the earth.” (Abraham Lincoln)

Peoples is only used in cases when it is necessary to distinguish between ethnic groups within the same geographical or cultural context.

The Israeli and Palestinian peoples have long been at war.

The peoples of the world practice a wide variety of religions.

“Persons,” “People,” or “Peoples”?

The plural of person should be people in the vast majority of contexts, although legalese uses the plural persons. Peoples should be reserved for instances where you are referring to more than one distinct ethnic group.

Where Do You Write for Work?

11 More Experts on How to Write Well This Year

In theory, writing is not hard labor. It’s less backbreaking than laying bricks all day, for instance. And compared to the average herpetologist, most writers’ workplaces involve far fewer smelly rooms full of snakes. For that, we should be grateful.

Still, writing is hard work. And that’s just as true for vaunted authors with numerous books, awards, and honorary degrees to their credit as it is for newcomers who only recently resolved to hammer out more words each week. If any of that sounds like you—if you’re looking to step up that content game—we have help, in the form of recent pointers and perspectives from veteran writers.

1 Read, write, rinse, repeat.

This battle-tested rule stands true whether you’re a longform magazine writer or a horror novelist. Asked how a newcomer can perfect the craft, the National Book Award–winning author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates tweeted this response:

“Reading. Then writing. Rinsing. Repeating. Only way. Not even snarking. It really is.” https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/814949934470483968

Be relentless.

2 Schedule meetings with yourself.

It’s easy to daydream about things you’d like to write, but sometimes harder to carve out time each day to, you know, actually write them. When writing the critically acclaimed Don’t Think Twice, comic Mike Birbiglia says he struggled with procrastination:

I had the movie in my head, but I wasn’t writing it. But I noticed this trend in my life, which was that I was showing up to lunch meetings or business meetings, but I wasn’t showing up to meet myself. So I wrote a note next to my bed — this is so corny, but I wrote, “Mike! You have an appointment at Café Pedlar at 7 a.m. with your mind!” It’s so corny, and I would show up! I never didn’t show up, and I wrote this movie [in] spurts of essentially three hours, like I’d write from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., and the reason why I would do that is because I was essentially barely awake. Because I feel like that moment, at 7 to 10 a.m., you’re not afraid of the world yet.

3 Have a plan.

For John McPhee, the prolific author, octogenarian, and veritable institution at The New Yorker, writing hinges on structure: taking the various puzzle pieces floating around in one’s mind and notes, and figuring out in what order to arrange them. (A puzzle becomes much easier to assemble when you know what it’s a picture of, after all.)

In crafting an outline, McPhee does not save the ending for last. Whether the piece will be five thousand words or five thousand sentences, he decides on his ending almost as soon as he’s settled on a lead sentence. Still, he concedes the work that ensues in between is, alas, rarely simple:

Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins. The narrative wants to move from point to point through time, while topics that have arisen now and again across someone’s life cry out to be collected. They want to draw themselves together in a single body, in the way that salt does underground. But chronology usually dominates. As themes prove inconvenient, you find some way to tuck them in.

We’ll come back to McPhee in a moment.

4 “Don’t be trapped by your limits. Get creative.” —Eric Heisserer

Screenwriter Eric Heisserer spent years slogging through drafts of a script for the film Arrival on spec before finding the right backers. One struggle was depicting how the aliens in his film would communicate; he later recalled of this frustration: “My omnipresent self-critic mocked me for running out of words to describe actual language.”

Then his wife had the brilliant idea to just include rough sketches of alien logograms right in the script—But Heisserer soon discovered no screenwriting software at the time could include graphics. Ultimately he settled on a work-around that involved re-inserting the images each time a revised draft went out. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

5 It’s okay to take breaks.

Not everyone is cut out to write entire chapters in a single sitting. “I think if you work beyond four hours it goes bad,” novelist Zadie Smith recently remarked.

In other words, don’t stress if your entire opus doesn’t come pouring out of your fingertips the moment you sit down at the keyboard. Even just getting to 800 words, Smith says, “feels like a champion day.”

6 Back your work up.

Laptops disappear. Hard drives crash. Buildings sometimes burn—leaving determined writers to charge past firefighters into the blazes to rescue their finished novels.

“THIS IS WHY WE DO CLOUD STORAGE, PEOPLE” https://twitter.com/FutureBoy/status/776531179059093505

It’s worth taking precautions to make sure, whatever else might go wrong, that your work survives intact.

7 Take your lumps, and keep at it.

Long before he was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” novelist Junot Díaz labored over a series of short stories for his peers in a grad-school workshop. His first effort there endured the kind of savage reviews that sometimes compel people to change professions:

Workshop rolls around and I still remember the feeling on my face as I watched my story get gutted. I’d caught beatdowns before, but this one was a graduate workshop beatdown and I felt those lumps for days. Sure, there was some mild praise about the setting and a few of my lines got checkmarks next to them, but the overwhelming reaction was negative.

Díaz stuck with it, inhaling huge volumes of short fiction each day, and persisting even after his second attempt met tepid responses. Battling through it all, Díaz discovered something about himself as a writer—something that stayed with him well through the publication of his first book.

8 Don’t wait for anyone to give you permission.

Anyone can be a writer. But before she was a Pulitzer-winning novelist, most recently grinding out the 736-page Barkskins, this would’ve been a surprise to Annie Proulx, as she once told The Paris Review:

I never thought of myself as a writer. I only backed into it through having to make a living. And then I discovered that I could actually do it. I thought there was some arcane fellowship that you knew at birth that you had to belong to in order to be a writer.

Don’t wait. Start now.

9 Be good to yourself.

Even wildly popular novelists who start working before 6 a.m. (looking at you, J.K. Rowling) aren’t above writing from the comfort of bed:

“Wake up, drag the laptop into bed and get to work. There’s really no need for formal attire.” https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/811579300021489664

Taking care of yourself doesn’t just mean finding the coziest place to operate, though. Daily exercise is a part of the process many writers swear by. From Haruki Murakami to Joyce Carol Oates, many specifically advocate running to help untangle the writerly knots of the mind.

10 Forgive yourself when it doesn’t come easy.

Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert says her latest book, The Sixth Extinction, was at times painful to work on: “I thought it was going to do me in, at points. It just wasn’t coming together.”

That a longtime journalist of Kolbert’s caliber still feels tested by the craft should hearten anyone who’s struggling to keep up with its attendant pressures and deadlines.

While piecing together the story was an arduous, years-long trek that took her everywhere from the Great Barrier Reef to a cloud forest in the Andes, Kolbert’s efforts ultimately paid off. Despite being “way overdue,” when it was finally done, the book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

11 Know when to stop.

A bonus from the aforementioned John McPhee, who plans his endings from the outset: You have to not only finish the piece but also conclude the process around it. Editing, it’s sometimes said, is the art of knowing when to stop tinkering.

People often ask how I know when I’m done—not just when I’ve come to the end, but in all the drafts and revisions and substitutions of one word for another how do I know there is no more to do? When am I done? I just know. I’m lucky that way. What I know is that I can’t do any better; someone else might do better, but that’s all I can do; so I call it done.

With diligence, you can carry your writing goals across the finish line. Grammarly will be there cheering you on.

Is Being a Perfectionist Really a Good Thing?

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.

—Anne Lamott

“I’m such a perfectionist!”

People sometimes utter that phrase with pride, wearing the title as a badge of honor, but I’ve never understood why anyone would think perfectionism is something to be pleased about. I’ve cried myself to sleep over a mistake, and I remember my embarrassing gaffes for years after everyone else involved has forgotten them. I’ve left two novels languishing, each over halfway complete, because my own writing is never good enough to satisfy me and I’m sure no one else will find it readable, either.

I’ve always found Holly Hunter’s character, Jane, in the 1980s classic Broadcast News infinitely relatable. She’s hard-driving, smart, and an absolute perfectionist, which makes her life as a Washington bureau network news producer challenging. On one hand, she’s insanely talented. On the other, she’s stressed to her breaking point and a pain to work with. In my favorite scene, Jane battles her boss over which colleague should anchor a breaking news story. She insists her choice is the only viable option. When her boss snarks that it must be nice to be the one who always thinks she knows best, Jane whispers, “No. It’s awful.”

I can say this with authority: there’s a difference between striving for excellence and perfectionism. One is an asset, the other’s a handicap.

What is perfectionism?

We all know people with higher-than-normal standards, people who like to be right, people who are ultra-competitive and need to win. But are they all perfectionists? We tend to lump many different personality types and behaviors under the perfectionism label, but clinical perfectionism is a different beast. According to Merriam-Webster, the medical definition is:

A disposition to regard anything short of perfection as unacceptable; especially : the setting of unrealistically demanding goals accompanied by a disposition to regard failure to achieve them as unacceptable and a sign of personal worthlessness.

Perhaps the key words in that definition are “unrealistically demanding.” Having high standards is fine. Striving for quality is admirable. But expecting nothing short of a flawless performance or outcome every time is a recipe for unhappiness. When failure to meet one’s own impossibly high standards results in a feeling of “personal worthlessness,” it’s clear why being a true perfectionist is as awful as Jane said.

Are you a perfectionist?

You might be, but whether or not it’s a problem seems to be both a matter of opinion and degrees. Mental health professionals can’t quite seem to agree on terms. Some believe that perfectionistic traits can be motivational, helping a person reach for excellence. Others argue that any level of perfectionism is problematic. At best, a tendency toward high standards can mean that a person will regularly produce quality work. At worst, expecting nothing short of perfection from yourself can have painful psychological side effects. Perfectionism might be a problem if:

• You can’t take criticism. Perfectionists tend to react negatively to criticism because they equate criticism with failure and failure with worthlessness. They often internalize their feelings by beating themselves up, or they might externalize them by becoming defensive and lashing out at their critics, regardless of whether the criticism is real or perceived.
• You’re critical of others. Although perfectionists can’t take criticism, they can dish it out. They not only hold themselves to impossible standards, they often have unreasonably high expectations for others, which can make them demanding and critical. They may also avoid delegating tasks because they fear no one else is capable of getting it right.
• You procrastinate. Some people put off important tasks until the last minute because they’re distracted by more fun activities. But when you so desperately want a project to be perfect that you can’t make yourself get started (or keep going), you’re procrastinating perfectionist style.
• You expect yourself to be instantly good at things. Perfectionists tend to expect a high level of competency from themselves right off the bat. When they struggle to learn a new skill, they prefer giving up to working harder.
• You’re motivated by fear of failure rather than a desire for success. High achievers tend to reach toward their goals because they’re driven by a desire to succeed. Perfectionists push themselves because they fear how others will perceive them if they’re anything less than the best.
• It’s your way or the highway. Perfectionists tend to like things a certain way—their way. They’re the ones reorganizing the dishwasher after someone else has loaded it, or scolding a colleague for using the wrong font in a document.
• You equate success with happiness. Perfectionists believe they can only be happy when they achieve perfection. But, because they’re rarely perfect, they’re rarely happy. Their constant worries about failing to meet their own impossible standards can lead to health problems such as depression, eating disorders, and anxiety. There’s even some evidence to show that perfectionists can have shorter lifespans.

Try to impress yourself, not anyone else

Experts have identified two types of perfectionism, a good kind and a bad kind. Those who try their best and expect themselves and others to do well, but who treat failures as learning opportunities rather than indicators of inferiority, are the good kind of perfectionists—achievers with high standards of excellence.

There’s nothing wrong with aiming high, but shooting for perfection should cause you to feel inspired, not anxious. In fact, research suggests that people who are motivated by a desire to please or impress others perform worse than those who simply set ambitious goals for themselves. If you drive yourself hard mainly because you’re worried others will see you as less-than-perfect, consider discarding impossibly high expectations and working toward getting good enough. Your quirks, and even your little mistakes, infuse your work with personality, so leave perfect precision to machines and remember that to err is human.

These Roaring Dinosaur Puns Will Help You Cope With Life

Besides being cool, dinosaurs are funny. Chuckling about these amusing extinct animals will help you cope with life. Check out these roaring dinosaur puns!

What do you call a dinosaur with an extensive vocabulary?

Answer: A thesaurus.

No list of dinosaur puns would be complete without this one. It is one of the oldest jokes in the book!

Why can’t you hear a pterodactyl going to the bathroom?

Answer: (Because the P is silent!)

While you have a giggle about that, take a moment to reflect on the other silent P words in the English language. How many do you know? Hint: These words begin with ps, pn, and pt. We found a vocabulary list with thirteen silent P words. Note: Technically, pterodactyls aren’t dinosaurs. Here’s why.

What do you call it when a dinosaur has a car accident?

Answer: A tyrannosaurus wreck!

Seriously, tyrannosaurs are often the butt of jokes because of their short arms. Thankfully, modern technology can provide extensions for a steering wheel.

Incidentally, if you look up dinosaur in the thesaurus, you will find a list of words that mean “obsolete” and “outmoded”! So, whenever you think that you had a hard day at work, remember, the dinosaurs had it worse! This isn’t actually a pun, but it’s sadly amusing!

Who makes the best prehistoric reptile clothes?

Answer: A dino-sewer!

Pronunciation is key to this pun. If you pronounce sewer like the system that carries away waste products, the joke does not make sense. In this case, sewer is someone who sews. After the release of a popular dinosaur movie, there are memes about velociraptor training all over the Internet. They are certainly scary, but so are most dinosaurs! See if you can figure out this tricky pun about another ancient reptile:

What is the scariest type of dinosaur?

Answer: A Terror-dactyl. Hopefully, these dinosaur puns made you smile. Remember them the next time you have a hard day! Which puns would you add to the list?

Which Grammar Rules Are Dying?

We all make mistakes. Sometimes, we even embrace them.

Such is the case with language. The words you’re reading right now are the product of centuries of slang, corruption, amalgamation, and lazy habits. The writers of today gently nudge future evolutions of English by choosing which mistakes will be acceptable tomorrow. (For instance, where you use verbs like “stung” and “stunk,” experts believe future writers may instead opt for “stinged” and “stinked.”)

At Grammarly, we’ve helped our users catch and fix millions of mistakes, ensuring their prose reads as deliberate and professional. But sometimes, writers bend the rules. And we’re not here to sneer – we’re all about putting grammar snobbery to bed!

Still, it’s fascinating to think that the rules people tend to ignore might someday not be rules at all. Here are the corrections we’ve noticed our users reject most often – which may give us some hints about changing usage and what kinds of mistakes are becoming more acceptable.

1 Ellipses

The old-school utility of the ellipsis (plural: ellipses) comes when leaving something out. Say you wanted to quote the U.S. Constitution’s protection for free speech; it’s part of the First Amendment, which fully reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

That’s one hefty sentence. For the sake of brevity, you might use a couple of ellipses to winnow down the germane pieces thusly:

Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .

That’s when the ellipsis is working as a buttoned-down professional, anyway. In less formal contexts, it can also show points where speakers pause or trail off, like so:

“So… What do you want to do?” “It might be fun to go to the movies…”

In text messaging, where some conversations are never-ending, it’s that last use where the ellipsis might be coming to reflect how such exchanges also tend to trail off rather than reach a clear-cut stopping point like “goodbye.”

Another potential factor driving an uptick in off-label ellipsis use might be a shifting interpretation of the staid and serious period – which in certain contexts may now be read as a flash of passive aggression.

2 Compound subjects

More than 10 percent of users faced with compound-subject problems ultimately rejected their suggested corrections – but wait, what does “compound subject” even mean?

A compound subject uses a conjunction to connect more than one noun phrase, as in “The hero and her golden retriever rescued three kittens.”

While the nouns in compound subjects aren’t typically separated by commas, they can be offset as such in cases where the second item is parenthetical: “The hero, and her sidekick, saved the kitties from a fire.”

Compound subjects can sometimes trigger subject-verb confusion. (If you find yourself tripped up by irregular verbs, know that compound subjects are always plural, as in “Onlookers and the cats’ owner were elated and grateful.”)

What this means for the evolution of language remains to be seen. But that Grammarly users often reject such corrections may suggest some inclination to sound conversationally natural, as in “The mayor says the girl’s courage and quick thinking is an inspiration.”

3 Hyphens

Hyphens tie words together. They most often come in handy when you have a compound modifier for a noun, like “rainy-day music” or “leopard-skin pill-box hat.”

But proper hyphenation can also feel deceptively complex. Hyphens are used to write out certain numbers (e.g., “twenty-three”) but they don’t apply to adverbs (“truly exciting”).

That Grammarly users don’t always opt to tweak their hyphenation (or lack thereof) may suggest a future where, sometimes, compound modifiers just feel clear enough on their own, without help from ancillary punctuation.

4 Lowercase i

Grammarly users frequently opt not to capitalize the first-person pronoun, I, instead going with the lowercase, as in “i think this is peachy.” And indeed, in casual venues like social media, it’s often fine – a stylishly unkempt affectation akin to shredded jeans or untamed hair, perhaps.

One of the main factors that steers which direction language drifts is whether a given convention is easily understood; confusing or unwieldy ones are quickly abandoned. But lowercase i isn’t complicated or difficult to parse, so while it’s most likely not a stellar choice when you’re drafting a cover letter, it’s probably not about to go away, either.

5 Oxford comma

A list of several items in a sentence puts the ever-industrious comma to work like so: “The author argues guns, germs, and steel all played parts in the conquest of the continent.” But that last comma, known as the Oxford comma or the serial comma, isn’t always crucial, as in this example: “The singer pleaded for his father to send help in the form of lawyers, guns and money.”

The case for the Oxford comma is that sometimes it’s essential for clarity, as in this sentence: “I’m fond of my dogs, Bertrand Russell and Ada Lovelace.” Unless you’ve selected truly erudite names to call your pets (in which case, bravo) you might want an Oxford comma to help clear that sentence up.

Still, we’ve found that Grammarly users frequently ignore suggestions to use the Oxford comma. One reason may simply be that it’s not always vital. Another may owe to its detractors; the Associated Press Stylebook, for instance, generally advises reporters and editors to skip the Oxford comma. All the same, it comes in quite handy from time to time, suggesting it’s most likely not about to disappear altogether.

6 Prepositions

In certain contexts, some prepositions just work better than others. Consider this: “Try your best out there – I believe at you.” Feels funky, doesn’t it?

Grammarly spotted some 26 million issues along these lines in users’ writing. And more than 6 percent of those who looked at potential remedies then decided “nah, I prefer it my way, thanks.”

As we ponder the ways English might change in subsequent generations, this might be worth keeping . . . in mind? Indeed, let’s stick with in, at least for now.

7 Question mark

Why do some people write perfectly reasonable questions that end with periods instead of question marks. And what does this portend about the evolution of English?

Well, as with the ellipsis, this convention may owe something to the ubiquity of text messaging. In texts, some questions aren’t really asking for any particular piece of information or response. For instance, consider “I have an urgent deadline, can we reschedule lunch.” In this example, I’m not posing a question at all; I’m informing you that I can’t make it to the cafe today, so we’ll have to meet another time.

And while, eventually, we will assuredly hash out a new lunch plan, there’s no question mark because right now I’m not eliciting your immediate input. It’s just not something I really want while facing a looming deadline.

As to this trend’s long-term ramifications for the question mark – well, who’s to say.

8 Subordinate clauses

Although this one might sound arcane, the challenge with subordinate clauses really just has to do with comma errors that can crop up in sentences like this one. Although the term “subordinating conjunction” may sound intimidating, it really just means words like the “although” at the beginning of this sentence here.

Subordinate clauses may sometimes make subject-verb agreement confusing, particularly when it comes to matters of singular and plural. If that’s you, don’t feel bad; we tallied almost 2 million instances where this came up. And if you were among the many thousands who shrugged and decided to stick with what you originally wrote, you may just be in the vanguard of a bold new linguistic convention.