GrammarPhile Blog

Grammar and informational or persuasive essay exercises aren’t the only important exercises writers need to do to hone their skills and craft.

Creative writing exercises also offer benefits to writers that are often overlooked and undervalued, especially in a world that’s shifting toward regimented standardized tests and data-driven work.

Here are seven benefits of completing creative writing exercises on a regular basis.

1. Building Confidence

When writing creatively, you’re engaging in an exercise that will allow you to truly develop your own voice and perspective without consequential limitations. You get a better opportunity to explore and express how you feel about topics, perspectives, philosophies, characters, etc. And this will allow you to feel more comfortable and confident when asserting your opinions and perspectives in other things you write, too.

Writers who don’t write creatively might worry about coming across as an authority or reliable source. By forgetting to insert their own take on the subjects that they’re writing about, they unintentionally end up losing their voice and sound like drones spouting off data. As a result, they lose out on utilizing their unique voice and coming across as an expert with real-world and firsthand experience.  

Merriam-Webster Dictionary added more than 1,000 words and phrases to the dictionary in 2017. And while we can’t highlight every single one here, we can highlight the most interesting words and phrases as well as those that received the most attention. According to Merriam-Webster:

An amazing writing portfolio makes you stand out online. How you create, design, develop, and promote your online writing portfolio makes all the difference. A well-designed and well-organized portfolio can determine whether you get noticed or not and can ensure you get work opportunities that reflect who you are as a writer.

Here are some online portfolio tools you’ll want to consider using when creating your online writing portfolio:

• Contently
• me
• Muck Rack
• Writerfolio
• Pressfolios

Whether you freelance, work for a single employer full-time, or take on contract writing work, these tools allow you to do things like upload your original work, use a customized URL, and select a theme. They also come with intuitive online and mobile navigation, so it’s easy for others to view your work, and they make it much easier for you to share your writing with others.

Here are some tips for building an amazing online writing portfolio, organized by writing industries.

Do you typically pride yourself on being able to catch even the smallest of errors in any piece of writing, whether they’re in an online advertisement or a novel? Do misspelled words and typos in a printed document drive you crazy? If so, here’s a fun proofreading quiz for you to take.

Take our quiz to test your basic proofreading knowledge and see if you can catch every single typo. See if you can get every question right and ace the entire quiz. And don’t look for any of the answers online, so you can really step up to the challenge!

Let us know how you did in the comments below. Good luck!

Do you rely on a grammar-checking software or tool, beyond what’s included in your everyday word processor? See if you can find your ideal grammar-checking tool on this list. And after scanning through the review of the most popular grammar-checking tools out there, continue reading to see why you still need a proofreader for your most important pieces of written work.

Writer’s block and looming deadlines can make work challenging for any writer regardless of what they’re writing. But disorganization and randomness can make completing writing tasks and projects seem almost impossible at times.

As a writer, your job is to make your writing enjoyable and easy to understand. That applies to everything you write, whether it’s a manual, a text book, a report, or any other type of technical writing that isn’t typically known as being “enjoyable” reading material.

Writers will often use industry jargon to make their writing easier to read and understand. But—as every reader knows—it doesn’t always work. In some cases, using industry jargon provides clarity. But in other cases, industry jargon will leave readers bewildered, frustrated, or bored.

So, how do you know when and how to use industry jargon so that your writing is clearer and easier to read? Continue reading to learn more.

Not every writer can aspire to be like Shakespeare — side-stepping grammar rules and conventions in clever ways, misspelling words that end up in the literature canon, and sometimes even making up rules as they go along. Nor should they.

Marketers, journalists, novelists, and business writers alike put their writing careers on the line when they make egregious grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors, with their credibility and professional standing often being called into question. But mistakes happen, especially grammatical ones. And although writers try to avoid mistakes at all costs, especially in marketing copy and business writing, some of these mistakes fall through the cracks and are printed for the whole world to see. Some of these mistakes are funny, some of them roll off the tongue and incorporate themselves into everyday vernacular, and some of them are downright offensive.

What we know as Christmas today is one of the most popular holidays celebrated around the world, when millions of people participate in festivities and traditions. Whether you call it Christmas or something else, the popular winter holiday is a byproduct of secular and religious traditions that have evolved over the past several hundred years. It’s a time for family and friends to come together, decorate their homes, exchange gifts, feast, be merry, and extend their generosity to their neighbors and greater communities. Here are some notable holiday stories from around the world and their origins. You’ll notice that all their origins lie in an explanation for gift-giving.

Identifying and understanding prefixes and suffixes of a word on their own may not be that difficult, but knowing where to put hyphens when you’re trying to write a uniquely arranged word or compound word isn’t always easy. Luckily, there are some general rules of thumb and tips to remember that everyone can follow to ensure that others at least understand what you’re trying to communicate. But first, let’s quickly recap what prefixes and suffixes are, and how they function.

Prefixes

Prefixes are added to the beginning of an existing word to create a new word with a different meaning. Prefixes don’t always have hyphens when they’re used, but they do change the grammatical function of a word in a sentence.