5 Fun and Free Online Grammar Games

This guest post by Maria Rainier.

Whether you’re a gram­mar nerd or learn­ing Eng­lish as a new lan­guage, we all know that prac­tice makes per­fect. Not all of us have the time to prac­tice gram­mar ins and outs, because our sched­ules keep us con­stantly on the go. But what bet­ter way to get in some Eng­lish gram­mar prac­tice once in a while than with an addic­tive, and portable, online game? Next time you have a few min­utes to spare or become bored with you lat­est attempt to con­quer Words with Friends, try out one of these sim­ple and addic­tive gram­mar games avail­able online.

1. Word Chal­lenge
This is a cool one. It’s addic­tive because it’s timed. Ques­tions mainly cover vocab­u­lary and word usage. Get the app here.

2. Gram­mar Up
This was designed based on com­mon areas cov­ered by the TOEIC Eng­lish pro­fi­ciency test and is geared toward busi­ness usage and vocab­u­lary. There are ten dif­fer­ent gram­mar cat­e­gories, and stu­dents can choose games based on those cat­e­gories. It’s a fun way to pass the time, great for ESL stu­dents, and a good refresher for native Eng­lish speak­ers. Check it out here.

3. The Gram­mar Goril­las
This is a cute game where play­ers iden­tify parts of speech in order to get bananas for gorilla friends. There are begin­ner and advanced set­tings. Try it free here.

4. Sink or Swim
The object of the game is to stay above water. If you make a mis­take, you will sink fur­ther below the sur­face; cor­rect answers keep you afloat. Try it here.

5. The Pre­fixes Game
Play­ers fit block together to build a tower and have to select pieces with the right shape and pre­fix in order to build the tower higher. Try it here.

Author Bio:
Maria Rainier is a free­lance writer and blog junkie. She is cur­rently a res­i­dent blog­ger at First in Edu­ca­tion where she writes about edu­ca­tion, online col­leges, online degrees etc. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gar­den­ing, swim­ming, and avoid­ing her laptop.

10 Language Translation Tools

This post shows you the top ten lan­guage trans­la­tion tools, cour­tesy of Emma Taylor:

10 amaz­ing trans­la­tion tools of tomorrow

Why you should avoid the passive voice

Guest post by Angelita Williams.

Gram­mar teach­ers always hound their stu­dents about the same errors. They tell their stu­dents to use proper verb sub­ject agree­ments, they teach about the per­ils of comma splices and proper semi­colon usage, and they dis­tin­guish between adverbs and gerunds like it’s the most impor­tant les­son of the Eng­lish lan­guage. Proper syn­tax in a sen­tence means everything.

I would argue that the most impor­tant gram­mar les­son has to do with the voice of a sentence—specifically, the line between pas­sive and active voice. Most gram­mar­i­ans, edi­tors, teach­ers, and pro­fes­sors com­plain more about pas­sive voice than any other gram­mat­i­cal “mis­take,” and for good rea­son. If you use too much of the pas­sive voice in your wiring, it just looks bad.

So what’s the dif­fer­ence between pas­sive and active voice?

The dif­fer­ence between pas­sive and active voice is a mat­ter of, well, action. A typ­i­cal sen­tence has a sub­ject, and verb, and the object of the verb. In an active sen­tence, the sub­ject car­ries out an action (the verb) onto some­thing (the object). Con­sider this sen­tence: “Carl drove the car.” the action in the sen­tence is clear: Carl (the sub­ject) car­ries does some­thing to an object (he dri­ves the car). Pas­sive voice tells the same story, but takes some of the action out of the sentence.

In the pas­sive voice, the same sen­tence would look like this: “The car was dri­ven by Carl.” Notice the syn­tax of the sen­tence and the new feel of the story within. The sen­tence men­tions Carl (the sub­ject) at the end of the sen­tence rather than at the begin­ning, and his actions have less weight to them. He did not drive the car; the car was dri­ven by him. The same event occurs in both sen­tences, but the pas­sive voice cre­ates dis­tance between the sub­ject and the subject’s actions.

Why the active voice always looks better

So if the active and the pas­sive voice vir­tu­ally tell the same story, why does it mat­ter if you pick one over the other? It’s a mat­ter of assert­ing your­self in your writ­ing: the pas­sive voice sug­gests, well, pas­siv­ity. Your writ­ing looks weaker and less con­vinc­ing when writ­ten in the pas­sive voice. There’s a bet­ter chance that your ideas will come off as con­fus­ing if you write them in the pas­sive voice, pre­cisely because the sub­ject is so far removed from the begin­ning of a sen­tence. Some writ­ers opt for the pas­sive voice because it pads their wiring, but that too is an insuf­fi­cient rea­son. Ideas that you can clearly write in the active voice might have a longer word count when flip­ping into pas­sive voice, but that won’t help your writ­ing style.

What do you do to com­bat the pas­sive voice in your writing?

By-line:
This guest post is con­tributed by Angelita Williams, who writes on the top­ics of online courses.  She wel­comes your com­ments at her email Id: angelita.williams7 @gmail.com.

18 English Words That Come From Irish

If you are into word ety­mol­ogy, you’ll like this. Here are 18 Eng­lish Words That Come From Irish.

Grammar vs. Usage

Guest post by Kim­berly Wilson.

Lan­guage is a tricky, sticky, icky thing, infa­mous for hav­ing too many rules that nobody fol­lows any­way — and espe­cially so in the Eng­lish language.

Your sopho­more Eng­lish teacher counted points off your mid-term paper for mis­takes that your boss’s boss makes every day in e-mails to the office, and the Oxford comma keeps appear­ing and dis­ap­pear­ing with­out any appar­ent reper­cus­sions whatsoever!

Is it an epi­demic of illit­er­acy? Does it mat­ter at all?

The answer to both ques­tions is, more or less: not really.

There are, of course, hard and fast rules that should be adhered to when writ­ing or speak­ing Eng­lish; adjec­tives must mod­ify nouns, sub­jects must agree with verbs, and so on.  But there is also a line that should be drawn in the sand for so-called gram­mar Nazis and other annoy­ing perfectionists.

In lin­guis­tic cir­cles, this line is called usage.  There is gram­mar, and there is usage.  Com­mon usage is fre­quently  at odds with mechan­i­cal con­ven­tions, often because speak­ing “prop­erly” is incon­ve­nient, awk­ward, or pre­ten­tious, and peo­ple want to sim­plify their lives and their speak­ing habits.

At its root, lan­guage is a tool used for com­mu­ni­cat­ing ideas from one per­son to another.  When you ask some­one where your pen is, and they tell you they “don’t know where it’s at,” are you com­pletely igno­rant of what they were try­ing to say? No. You know exactly what they meant. It might not have been “gram­mat­i­cally cor­rect,” but it got the point across, and the result was a suc­cess­ful com­mu­nica­tive event.

Dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions call for dif­fer­ent degrees of pre­ci­sion and for­mal­ity, but for the most part, you can reserve impec­ca­ble gram­mar for schol­arly essays, resumes, inter­views, and other impor­tant junc­tures.  Let lan­guage serve its pur­pose, and you’ll be hap­pier, health­ier, and gen­er­ally more well-liked.

Byline:
Kim­berly Wil­son is from accred­ited online col­leges, she writes on top­ics includ­ing career, edu­ca­tion, stu­dent life, col­lege life, home improve­ment, time man­age­ment etc.

The Eight Easiest Foreign Languages for English Speakers

This handy arti­cle tells us about the eight eas­i­est for­eign lan­guages for Eng­lish speak­ers to learn. Sur­prise! Ger­man isn’t one of them.

Eight Eas­i­est For­eign Lan­guages for Eng­lish Speakers

Famous Authors on Grammar

Guest post by Erinn Stam.

Not all writ­ers have a firm grasp of gram­mar — that’s why there are edi­tors. But most writ­ers do have plenty of opin­ions about the role of gram­mar in lan­guage and writ­ing. Here are some of the best quotes from famous writ­ers about grammar:

• “Gram­mar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about gram­mar is its power.” ~ Joan Didion
• “Gram­mar, which knows how to con­trol even kings.” ~ Moliere
• “I demand that my books be judged with utmost sever­ity, by knowl­edge­able peo­ple who know the rules of gram­mar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the foot­steps of my com­mas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.” ~ Louis Aragon
• “I don’t know the rules of gram­mar… If you’re try­ing to per­suade peo­ple to do some­thing, or buy some­thing, it seems to me you should use their lan­guage, the lan­guage they use every day, the lan­guage in which they think. We try to write in the ver­nac­u­lar.” ~ David Ogilvy
• “The greater part of the worlds’ trou­bles are due to ques­tions of gram­mar.” ~ Michel de Montaigne
• “Gram­mar is the grave of let­ters.” ~ Elbert Hubbard
• “It is well to remem­ber that gram­mar is com­mon speech for­mu­lated.” ~ William Som­er­set Maugham
• “Writ­ing is an act of faith, not a trick of gram­mar.” ~ E.B. White
• “When a thought takes one’s breath away, a gram­mar les­son seems an imper­ti­nence.” ~ Thomas W. Higginson
• “The writer who neglects punc­tu­a­tion, or mis­punc­tu­ates, is liable to be mis­un­der­stood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a para­dox, or that a sar­casm is con­verted into a ser­monoid.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe
• “Like every­thing meta­phys­i­cal, the har­mony between thought and real­ity is to be found in the gram­mar of the lan­guage.” ~ Lud­wig Wittgenstein
• “You can be a lit­tle ungram­mat­i­cal if you come from the right part of the coun­try.” ~ Robert Frost
• “Com­mas in The New Yorker fall with the pre­ci­sion of knives in a cir­cus act, out­lin­ing the vic­tim.” ~ E.B. White
• “Damn the sub­junc­tive. It brings all our writ­ers to shame.” ~ Mark Twain
• “My atti­tude toward punc­tu­a­tion is that it ought to be as con­ven­tional as pos­si­ble. The game of golf would lose a good deal if cro­quet mal­lets and bil­liard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal bet­ter than any­one else with the reg­u­lar tools before you have a license to bring in your own improve­ments.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
• “No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.” ~ Isaac Babel
• “Some­times you get a glimpse of a semi­colon com­ing, a few lines far­ther on, and it is like climb­ing a steep path through woods and see­ing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catch­ing your breath.” ~ Lewis Thomas
• “When I hear the hyper­crit­i­cal quar­rel­ing about gram­mar and style, the posi­tion of the par­ti­cles, etc., etc., stretch­ing or con­tract­ing every speaker to cer­tain rules of theirs. I see that they for­get that the first req­ui­site and rule is that expres­sion shall be vital and nat­ural, as much as the voice of a brute or an inter­jec­tion: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, arti­fi­cial or father tongue. Essen­tially your truest poetic sen­tence is as free and law­less as a lamb’s bleat.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
• “Igno­rant peo­ple think it’s the noise which fight­ing cats make that is so aggra­vat­ing, but it ain’t so; it’s the sick­en­ing gram­mar they use.” ~ Mark Twain
• “I believe that every Eng­lish poet should read the Eng­lish clas­sics, mas­ter the rules of gram­mar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, expe­ri­ence the hor­ror of sor­did pas­sion and — if he’s lucky enough — know the love of an hon­est woman.” ~ Robert Graves
• “GRAMMAR, n. A sys­tem of pit­falls thought­fully pre­pared for the feet of the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to dis­tinc­tion.” ~ Ambrose Bierce
• “My spelling is Wob­bly.  It’s good spelling but it Wob­bles, and the let­ters get in the wrong places.”  ~A.A. Milne
• “Cor­rect Eng­lish is the slang of prigs who write his­tory and essays.”  ~George Eliot

  “Gram­mar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the gram­mar of rea­son.”  ~Richard C. Trench

• “Only in gram­mar can you be more than per­fect.”  ~William Safire
• “Here is a les­son in writ­ing. First rule: Do not use semi­colons. They are trans­ves­tite her­maph­ro­dites rep­re­sent­ing absolutely noth­ing. All they do is show you’ve been to col­lege.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Every author’s atti­tudes towards style are as dif­fer­ent as his or her own writ­ing style. What is your per­sonal take on the role of gram­mar? With which authors do you most agree or dis­agree? Why?

Bio:

Erinn Stam is the Man­ag­ing Edi­tor for a nurs­ing schol­ar­ship web­site. She attends Wake Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­nity Col­lege and is learn­ing about schol­ar­ships for lpn. She lives in Durham, NC with her lovely 4-year-old daugh­ter and exu­ber­ant husband.

Is it Just Me, or is the Difference Between ‘I’ and ‘Me’ Confusing?

Do you remem­ber when you were a lit­tle kid, and you would ask your par­ents whether “me and Friend X could go out and play”? Do you remem­ber being reminded that it is actu­ally “Friend X and I”? When I was younger, I received this par­tic­u­lar gram­mar cor­rec­tion from my par­ents all the time. And it led me to believe that one should use I in all instances when you are talk­ing about two or more peo­ple, one of which includes you.

It wasn’t until I was older that I real­ized that the mis­use of I and me is almost every­where. As such, it is no sur­prise that I got this one par­tic­u­lar gram­mar point wrong for most of my life. If you, too, find “I” and “me” con­fus­ing, then here are a few steps to remem­ber how to use each word correctly.

1. Learn the dif­fer­ence between sub­jec­tive and objec­tive case.

The most impor­tant way to really learn any rule is to under­stand why it exists in the first place. “Me” is an objec­tive pro­noun, mean­ing it is used when it is refer­ring to an object. An object, gram­mat­i­cally speak­ing, means that it receives action instead of caus­ing action. So, for exam­ple, in the state­ment “Mike helped him,” Mike is the sub­ject, because he causes the action. He helps him. “Him” receives help, and there­fore is the object in the sen­tence. Remem­ber the dif­fer­ence between actor and receiver, and know­ing the dif­fer­ence between sub­jec­tive and objec­tive case becomes easy.

2. Learn the objec­tive case pro­nouns of all sub­jec­tive pronouns.

Now, to extend your abil­ity to use all pro­nouns cor­rectly, not just know­ing when to use “I” or “me,” it is impor­tant to learn every objec­tive case pro­noun for its sub­jec­tive coun­ter­part. Mem­o­rize the fol­low­ing chart:

Sub­jec­tive           Objec­tive

I                            Me

He                        Him

She                      Her

It                          It

They                    Them

We                        Us

Who                     Whom

3. Do the sin­gu­lar test if still aren’t sure.

If you still aren’t quite sure, there is an easy test to deter­mine whether you are using I or me cor­rectly. Most peo­ple use the pro­nouns incor­rectly when there are used in com­pound form. For exam­ple, “He and I went to the store” has a com­pound sub­ject (mul­ti­ple sub­jects). If you aren’t sure which pro­noun to use, make the sub­ject or object sin­gu­lar, using only the pro­noun, like this:

“She sat on him and I.” -→ “She sat on I.”

The sec­ond sen­tence, once made sin­gu­lar, obvi­ously looks and sounds wrong. Let’s try it again:

“Jeff and I are going to the store.”→ “I am going to the store.”

Here, the sec­ond con­verted sen­tence makes sense, indi­cat­ing that the use of the pro­noun is cor­rect. If you were to replace the ‘I’ with ‘me’ you would see that it is clearly wrong: “Me am going to the store.”

Once you break down the rea­sons for rules, and you learn lit­tle tricks like the one above, you’d be sur­prised by how many of your gram­mar issues are resolved.

By-line:
Mar­i­ana Ash­ley is a free­lance writer who par­tic­u­larly enjoys writ­ing about online col­leges. She loves receiv­ing reader feed­back, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031 @gmail.com.

Colons, Dashes and More

More gram­mar wis­dom from the New York Time’s Philip B. Cor­bett. Colons, Dashes, and More

30 Common English Idioms and Their History

Here’s a delight­ful list of the thirty most com­mon Eng­lish idioms (fig­ures of speech) and their his­tor­i­cal ori­gins. You’ll learn the ori­gins of the phrases like “green-eyed mon­ster,” “apple of my eye,” “skele­ton in the closet” and many others.

30 Com­mon Eng­lish Idioms