Commas are confusing creatures. You don’t know when to use them and when to ditch them. Nevertheless, you must learn when to add a comma to your sentence if you want to make your writing more legible. You see, a big part of using commas revolves around the meaning of a sentence and the information …
English
There are many expressions in the English language that we take for granted and don’t give a second thought to. For example, when was the last time you gave “someone a taste of their own medicine”? Or, has it ever happened to you that something bad turned out to be a “blessing in disguise”? You …
Whenever you are talking to someone, you always want to tie everything you say together. It makes it easier for the listener to follow you. This is why you may find yourself using words like “however,” “so,” and “because.” Each one of these words hints at the relationship between what you are about …
Even though it is usually better to be concise, there are a lot of situations in English where you’ll find an expression can convey what you want to say better than a single word can. For instance, you can call a man “laconic,” or you can refer to him as “a man of few …
The English language is filled with similar words that can have different meanings. That is why this West Germanic language can be so confusing for beginners. For instance, fortuitous and fortunate have two different meanings, and torturous has a very different definition than tortuous. One reason there are so many words that are so similar …
English is the international language. It is the second most spoken language in the world after Mandarin, and it dominates more than 55 percent of all online content, making it the de facto language of the World Wide Web. So, in a globalized world, one that is getting smaller by the day, English has been …
When you start writing, one of the first thing style manuals teach you is to avoid using the word “very”. So, instead of quantifying an adjective with the rather generic word “very”, find a stronger adjective that does the trick. For instance, rather than describing someone as “very smart”, you could describe them as “brilliant” …
In today’s ultra-connected world, one that moves at a break-neck pace, email has become the preferred medium of communication for many professionals. If you think about it, it kind of makes sense: For one thing, emails don’t take up any physical space, yet, at the same time, you never have to worry about losing a …
Here, at Linguablog, we’ve explored various aspects of language. We’ve looked at how language intersects with culture. We’ve delved into how certain words originate and how they morph over time. And, we’ve talked about various grammatical rules that make English the beautiful, rich language it is today. However, one thing we haven’t talked about all …