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 amazing translation tools of tomorrow

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.

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.

Eight Easiest Foreign Languages for English Speakers

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.

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.

30 Common English Idioms