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 wordiness


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 17

Gained in Translation

So much of writing is very difficult to teach; there’s no formula, no one way to do things.  Language, after all, is dependent on both the speaker and the listener, and they may interpret a word a different way. Found this page on smartwords.org.  If you scroll down, you’ll find the third section is entitled [...]

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 [...]