Are you passionate about grammar? March forth with us on National Grammar Day!

March 4th is National Grammar Day in the United States. Each year we rally all the grammar-loving troops to raise awareness about the value of proper grammar and about good writing overall. This year we have some exciting initiatives to get everyone thinking about good grammar!

The Grammarly Grammar Nerd Personality Quiz

Every English language lover knows that not every grammar fiend is created equally. Starting from March 3rd, Grammarly will be actively promoting our fun personality quiz to help you find out if you are a pedant’s best friend or a grammatical non-conformist. You don’t have to wait until March 3rd, however; the quiz page is live now!

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Extra content to celebrate National Grammar Day

In addition to the quiz, we are encouraging our large, active social communities to talk about grammar more during this week. Starting on March 1st, we’ll be sharing a series of engaging examples of why #GrammarMatters. Along with each post, we’ll ask fans to share images or statuses that show exactly why grammar and proper writing are important. Our goal is to make #GrammarMatters a trending U.S. hashtag on March 4th!

Please attribute this content to grammarly.com/grammar-check.

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

Please attribute this content to grammarly.com/grammar-check.

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

Please attribute this content to grammarly.com/grammar-check.

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Additional information To document our celebration of this fun, educational holiday, we will be tracking social response metrics and summarizing our findings in an infographic during the days following Grammar Day. If you would like to be notified of this infographic, please email your request to nbaron@grammarly.com.

National Grammar Day is a relatively new holiday, having been designated only seven years ago. The day was established by Martha Brockenbrough, founder of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar.

How did you learn grammar?

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.

Two Underrated Christmas Stories to Read This Season

Welcome to Day Two of LitMas, the holiday for bookworms of all sorts! Yesterday, we gave you one short poem by Longfellow, and today we have another gift to share.

On the second day of LitMas, we’re paying homage to LitMas’s distant cousin, Christmas, with two stories you can read in less than an hour about this fascinating holiday. They’re both old enough to be classics, although neither of them gets as much attention as the “Night Before Christmas” and “Christmas Carol” set.

Read The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus for a Wacky Santa Backstory

In all this world there is nothing so beautiful as a happy child.

Did you know that the writer of The Wizard of Oz also wrote a Santa backstory in the same universe? No? Then it’s time to check out this highly fantastical account of Santa’s entire life, complete with woodland fairies, nymphs, and (in the sequel) the same bubbles Glinda uses to travel to Oz. Of course, this Santa saga is far from canon, but it reads like old-timey fantasy fanfic. And who couldn’t love a good alternate universe Santa this holiday season?

Read the full The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus here.

Dive into A Pictorial History of Santa Claus for the Real Santa History

Image Source.

If nonfiction dominates your reading list, we’d recommend you give the Public Domain Review’s image-laden history of Santa Claus a read. Their thorough history of Santa’s look dispels some rumors about the red suit’s origin, such as the popular myth that it was created by a beverage company. Their writers also went deep in the archives to pull old Santa looks, and some of them are downright delightful. Don’t want to know the man behind the red-and-white curtain? You can always check out the history of Rudolph instead. Either way, knowing the history behind these cultural icons is fascinating.

Read the full A Pictorial History of Santa Claus here.

Want to create a new holiday story with us live? Tune in to our Facebook Live broadcast Thursday at 6 p.m. PST / 9 p.m. EST!

Why “the Internet” Shouldn’t Be Stripped of Its Proper Noun Status

Breaking news! Read all about it—The Associated Press, one of the most widely followed authorities on written style, has lowercased the word “internet” in their 2016 style guide.

Starting today, AP uses lowercase internet and web in all instances. #APStyleChat

The decision has sparked much debate in the editorial and technology industries and beyond, but this isn’t the first time that an AP Stylebook change has caused some ripples . . . and perhaps even confusion. Case in point: why in the world is there a hyphen in “e-commerce” but not “email”?

The Evolution of the Term

The word originated as the adjective “internetted,” basically meaning “interconnected” when describing a network of multiple computer networks. “Internet” eventually replaced “internetwork” as the standardized term, evolving from an adjective into a noun.

The Importance of the Word “The”

There’s a distinction here between “an internet,” which simply refers to one of those networks of networks, and “the Internet,” the global network of networks. While “internet” is most commonly used in the context of the latter, many IT professionals and network engineers would be happy to correct you on the important difference a single article makes.

The Argument for Lowercasing

“The Internet” has been a proper noun for quite some time, but due to its prevalence in our daily lives, does it really need to be a proper noun anymore? Many argue that it shouldn’t; in casual use, it most often refers to the global network, and regular people tend not to talk about lesser internets. This means that we should let go of the practice of moving our pinky to the Shift key while typing.

The Reasons It Should Stay Capitalized

Basically, the above argument is silly when you phrase it in a different way: people shouldn’t capitalize things if they’re used a lot. However, we still capitalize “Mom” despite seeing her every day. The capitalization for many moms or even “my mom” is different from “Hey, Mom!” because in the last case “Mom” is a proper noun—the way we make the distinction between an internet and the Internet (even if the latter is used more).

The Internet as a Geo Locale

The first place to look for capitalization conventions should perhaps be in how we treat important places, locations, and landmarks. Unconventionally, the Internet is a sorta kinda place, and many places get capitalized: Paris, the Grand Canyon, Florida, the Empire State Building. “The desert” and “the universe” are not capitalized despite their geographical nature, the reason harking back to the original proper noun vs. common noun debate.

The Internet as a Unique Entity

So what exactly determines whether “the Internet” should remain a proper noun, deserving of capitalization? AP lets “usage dictate style,” but is that the common sense approach? Slate makes the most compelling argument—the Internet is a completely new, unique, and disruptive thing in our lives. If that’s not enough, I don’t know what is.

What are your thoughts: Internet or internet?

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Amanda Edens is an editor and content marketer with a wide range of talents from management to design. Check out her blog at www.askyoureditor.com or follow her on twitter @askyoureditor

Past Perfect Continuous Tense

The past perfect continuous tense (also known as the past perfect progressive tense) shows that an action that started in the past continued up until another time in the past. The past perfect continuous tense is constructed using had been + the verb’s present participle (root + -ing).

Unlike the present perfect continuous, which indicates an action that began in the past and continued up to the present, the past perfect continuous is a verb tense that indicates something that began in the past, continued in the past, and also ended at a defined point in the past.

He had been drinking milk out the carton when Mom walked into the kitchen.

I had been working at the company for five years when I got the promotion.

When, for, since, and before are words that you may see used alongside the past perfect continuous tense.

Martha had been walking three miles a day before she broke her leg.

The program that was terminated had been working well since 1945.

Cathy had been playing the piano for 35 years when she was finally asked to do a solo with the local orchestra.

He had been throwing rocks at her window for five minutes before she finally came out on the balcony and said, “Hey, Romeo.”

How Do You Spell the Color Gray?

As a noun, gray usually refers to the color. It can be used as an adjective when we want to say that the color of something is a shade of gray. It can also be used as a verb, for when something turns gray. But regardless of its use, you’ll sometimes find that gray is not spelled the way you think it should be. Or, you might be reading this and thinking “those people at Grammarly really don’t know their spelling—it’s grey.” So, what’s behind the grey/gray dilemma, and is there any difference between them, besides the obvious?

Grey and gray are two different spellings of the same word. Gray is more common in the U.S., while grey is more common in other English-speaking countries. In proper names—like Earl Grey tea and the unit Gray, among others—the spelling stays the same, and they need to be memorized.

Gray vs. Grey—Where Does the Difference Come From?

Does your vowel choice really make a lot of difference in the case of the color gray? It doesn’t.

Here’s a tip: The spelling doesn’t affect the meanings, and both spellings are perfectly fine. However, be sure to use the style appropriate for your geography.

The pronunciation remains the same regardless of the spelling you’re using. In fact, both spellings have the exact same origin.

Both gray and grey come from the Old English word grǽg. Over time, many different spellings of the word developed. The Middle English poem “The Owl and the Nightingale,” which was written in the twelfth or thirteenth century, uses the spelling “greie.” The fourteenth-century translation of the French poem “Roman de la Rose” uses the spelling “greye.” “Graye” can be found in the poem “Piers Plowman” written by William Langland in the second half of the fourteenth century. Examples of the spellings we use today can also be found in Middle English literature.

By the eighteenth century, “grey” had become the more common spelling, even though the legendary lexicographer Samuel Johnson thought that “gray” was a better version. In the nineteenth century, English dictionaries followed Johnson’s cue and prescribed “gray” as the correct version, but to no avail. By the twentieth century, “grey” had become the accepted spelling everywhere except in the United States.

Here’s a tip: Gray is more common in the United States, and grey is more common in the rest of the English-speaking world.

So, you can write:

The thing that stuck with me from the time I spent in London was the gray sky.

But you can also write:

The thing that stuck with me from the time I spent in London was the grey sky.

We use gray/grey as a verb when we want to say that something is becoming gray/grey. Because gray/grey hair is usually associated with aging, we sometimes mention it as a way to show that someone is getting older:

John’s hair started to gray/grey long before he retired.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re using the word “gray” as a noun, adjective, or a verb. You can say that someone’s hair has grayed over a couple of months, but you can also say that it greyed. Things can be greyish, but they can also be grayish.

Grey and Gray—Are They Always Interchangeable?

In common usage, there’s no difference between the words grey and gray. Some people might believe each spelling refers to a different shade of gray, and it’s quite possible you’ll see this in practice when looking at color swatches.

But there are a couple of cases where you really should mind the vowels. One of those cases is greyhound, the dog breed. It should always be spelled with an e, not an a. It’s the other way around for the grayling, a species of fish with a name that’s always spelled with an a.

If Grey is someone’s last name, you obviously shouldn’t change it to Gray to match the way you think it should be spelled. Proper nouns are off limits—the vowels in them cannot be changed. And neither can the vowel in Gray, the unit for food irradiation—it’s always spelled with an a.

Gone vs. Went–Learn the Difference

Went is the past tense of go. Gone is the past participle of go.

Examples:

I go to the store. (present tense)

I went to the store. (past tense)

I have gone to the store. (past participle)

If you aren’t sure whether to use gone or went, remember that gone always needs an auxiliary verb before it (has, have, had, is, am, are, was, were, be), but went doesn’t.

I could have gone to the store yesterday.

I could have went to the store.