Grammarly Blog

This blog is for students, educators, writers, and anyone else with an interest (passing or obsessive) in the English language. We discuss language-related topics with a special focus on the amazing capabilities of the written word.

Posts Tagged verbing


May 09

Logatome! Whooo!!!!!!!

That’s what my friend said to me.  He’s a weird one, all right, but that was even a little out there for him.  It was his response to my warning: “I reserve the right to comment on ‘palage’.”  (You can find “palage” in its singular context here.) Logatomes are made-up words that sound like real [...]

July 12

Reverse Psychology

I occasionally teach creative writing; last week’s class involved an exercise where we took the “World’s Worst Poem” (according to Google) and fixed it.  One of the people noted that she was able to see many faux pas in the author’s style of which she, herself, was guilty.  We all had a look at the [...]

May 03

Wordiness: a danger

I think the business world is doing terrible things to communication; it is encouraging formulaic phrases over word choice, jargon over commonly-understood terms, “professionalism” over knowledge.   It encourages verbing. We all know how academia feels about verbing. I found this nice little site about wordiness.  For those of you who have been taking business communication [...]

February 01

Verbing

I have an adult student who has come to me for tutoring.  Although his spoken English is excellent, his written English requires some work.  He came to Canada recently, and just signed himself up for some courses at the local college.  He’s taking, amongst other courses, Business Communication and Introduction to English Literature. We had [...]