The Writing Center

How to Respectfully Disagree in Writing It happens all the time—you and someone you know disagree about something more important than who has the best curry in town, and…

Ditransitive Verbs in English, Explained Verbs aren’t just verbs. As you know from studying the different parts of speech, just about…

6 Ways to Start an Email, and 6 to Avoid Inboxes are swamped with incoming and outgoing emails throughout the day. According to Campaign Monitor, an email marketing platform, the average person sends…

How British English and American English are Different Many Americans who love tea would turn up their noses at the idea of adding milk to it. Brits, on the other hand,…

It’s Time to Refresh These 7 Common Writing Habits As you develop your writing skills, it’s easy to adopt a few habits along the way. Some of these habits are helpful, like…

How to Take Descriptive Writing to the Next Level Sometimes, writing feels like you’re climbing up a hill. A slippery, muddy hill. During a rainstorm. Even when the words are…

Top 30 Commonly Confused Words in English Everyone knows the problem with spell-check: your word might be spelled right, but it may be the wrong word. English is full of confusing words…

24 Wordplay-Based Jokes That Make Us Giggle At Grammarly, we think about putting words together like it’s our job, and that’s because, well, it is. So…

“Burned” Versus “Burnt” I used to be a terrible cook. One problem was that I would get distracted and end up burning things a lot, but in such cases, should I say dinner is burned or should I say it’s burnt? Why do we have two forms of that word? The Verb: 'Burned' Versus 'Burnt' Burned and burnt ar

Janus Words: 'Sanction' and 'Cleave' In this dark first month of the year, it seems like a good time to talk about Janus words, also known as contronyms and auto-antonyms, because January gets its name from the two-faced Roman god named Janus as well. Words that have two opposite meanings such as “dust” (which can mean bot

20 Women Who Paved the Way in Writing Every female writer picking up her pen or opening her laptop today to write—whether her métier be fact or fiction—builds upon a powerful…