Capitalization in Titles

Won­der­ing how to cap­i­tal­ize words in titles? This short expla­na­tion tells you how to cor­rectly cap­i­tal­ize titles.
Cap­i­tal­iza­tion in Titles

Politicians, Watch Your Grammar!

A new study con­ducted by psy­chol­o­gists at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia, Merced and Indi­ana Uni­ver­sity, Bloom­ing­ton, shows that the gram­mar politi­cians use affects elec­tion out­comes. Using the per­fect aspect, in this case the past tense with the word “had,”–instead of the imper­fect aspect, “was hav­ing,” which con­veys con­tin­u­ing action into the present–improves your elec­tion chances in upcom­ing elec­tions by a sig­nif­i­cant amount, at least for neg­a­tively per­ceived behav­ior. See http://scim.ag./grammar-matters

How To Write With Ordinal Numbers

This con­cise post tells you how to cor­rectly write with ordi­nal num­bers.
Writ­ing With Ordi­nal Numbers

Are You A Grammar Geek? 35 Signs To Watch For

This funny and inter­est­ing post is worth look­ing at. How to tell if you are an Eng­lish gram­mar geek:

35 Signs That You Are A Gram­mar Geek

English Grammar and Correct Usuage Quizzes

This site looks very chal­leng­ing and prob­a­bly is very good for your Eng­lish. It’s full of Eng­lish gram­mar quizzes for you to try at your own pace. I think you will find it inter­est­ing and use­ful. Some of the quizzes include prepo­si­tions, using the cor­rect tense, fill­ing in mis­sive words, pas­sive voice, and many oth­ers. Each quiz is ranked by dif­fi­culty and there are dif­fer­ent lev­els of dif­fi­culty for each type of quiz, so you can choose which is best for you. Take a look at:

http://www.NonStopEnglish.com/

Learn English Through Song

(This post is from guest blog­ger Angelita Williams)

Textbooks–they’re my own per­sonal form of Ambien.   I’ve never been able to fig­ure it out, no mat­ter what it is, one page and I’m out like a light. But let me play with my Ipod and the music car­ries me for days.  I boast about being able to learn an entire new song in just a few hours.

You might not think of it as study­ing but in a sense that’s exactly what you are doing. You lis­ten and repeat, lis­ten and repeat, until the lyrics are per­ma­nently implanted in your head. And unlike mate­r­ial gained through books, songs can radi­ate through your head for days or even weeks before they’re entirely flushed down the drain.

So, what bet­ter way to study Eng­lish than learn­ing it through song? You get to learn vocab­u­lary while hear­ing its proper pro­nun­ci­a­tion, though you might want to stay away from rap or any­thing too mod­ern just for now, since col­lo­qui­alisms are best learned at a more advanced stage, when you can tell the dif­fer­ence between cor­rect and incor­rect idiom usage. Below are some quick tips on how to study your lyrics:

1. Pick a song that you like but that is not too com­plex. It’s extremely impor­tant that you get the cor­rect lyrics so that you can deci­pher the right mean­ing of the song. Lyrics mode is a great site to get accu­rate lyrics.

2. Read the lyrics in their entirety. You don’t need to under­stand every­thing but try to see if you can at least get a good feel of what the song is about. Is it a roman­tic song? A sad song? A happy song? Is it abstract or lit­eral? Try to com­pare and con­trast the Eng­lish song to some­thing famil­iar in your native tongue. It’ll help you see sim­i­lar and cul­tural dif­fer­ences from your own.

3. Re-read and cir­cle all the words/phrases you don’t know and would like to learn. Some­times con­text clues will give you a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what the word means but if nec­es­sary, by all means look up their exact mean­ing in a dic­tio­nary. A dic­tio­nary might also be use­ful in find­ing other inter­est­ing phrases or words.

4. Hear the song three to four times before you decide to chime in karaoke style. Read the lyrics a few times right before bed and also try lis­ten­ing to the song while you sleep. Even in your slum­ber, your brain will still retain the infor­ma­tion. Lis­ten and repeat until you got it down.

5. Test your­self. There’s a neat Web site called Lyrics Train­ing that is espe­cially designed to help non-English speak­ers learn the lan­guage. As a series of song lyrics run down the screen its up to you to fill in the miss­ing words. You can choose from a huge selec­tion of con­tem­po­rary songs in their bank that are divided into easy, medium and hard dif­fi­culty levels.

By-line:

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

They’re In Their Car Over There: Never Confuse Your Homophones Again

(This post from guest con­trib­u­tor Alexis Bonari.)
Homo­phones are those words that sound the same and are often even spelled in sim­i­lar ways, but mean dif­fer­ent things. They can be frus­trat­ing to both stu­dents of Eng­lish as a sec­ond lan­guage and native speak­ers who get hung up on try­ing to fig­ure out which word to use in a cer­tain con­text. The fol­low­ing are some com­mon mis­takes made with homo­phones that you can eas­ily avoid by learn­ing how to use each spe­cific word.

Com­pli­ment vs. Complement

The word “com­pli­ment” is used to describe or refer to a pos­i­tive com­ment given to a friend, as in “Rita com­pli­mented Sue on her new Mozart wig.” Some­thing “com­pli­men­tary” is given as a bonus, nicety or extra fea­ture, as in “The hotel offered a com­pli­men­tary break­fast.” When you use the word “com­ple­ment,” you should be describ­ing some­thing that com­pletes some­thing else. For exam­ple, you might say, “This white wine really com­ple­ments the seafood din­ner.” An easy way to remem­ber this is to think of “com­plete” when you say “com­ple­ment” because both words use “e” as their sec­ond vowels.

Prin­ci­pal vs. Principle

“Prin­ci­pal” often refers to rank of impor­tance, as in “prin­ci­pal request,” and can also be used to mean the head of a school or a sum of money. “Prin­ci­ples” often refer to a person’s rules of action or con­duct, as in “He was a man of good principles.”

Their vs. There

The word “their” is pos­ses­sive and indi­cates own­er­ship. For exam­ple, you could say that “Fred is their pet octo­pus.” When using “there,” you should be talk­ing about a place or loca­tion, as in “The Ear­wax Museum is over there.”

Peace vs. Piece

A fre­quent mis­take made with these homo­phones is “piece of mind.” You can give some­one a piece of your mind, but peace of mind is entirely dif­fer­ent. “Piece” indi­cates a part of some­thing else, as in “a piece of pie,” but “peace” is strictly a state of har­mony or absence of war.

Sta­tion­ary vs. Stationery

The word “sta­tionery” only refers to paper used for writ­ing notes or let­ters, as well as writ­ing mate­ri­als like envelopes and pens. It should never be used instead of the word “sta­tion­ary,” which refers to a state of still­ness or lack of movement.

Affect vs. Effect

When you use the word “affect,” you should be using it pri­mar­ily as a verb. It is used to describe an action per­formed on some­thing, as in “The inces­sant snor­ing neg­a­tively affected his mar­riage.” Only dis­ci­plines like psy­chol­ogy and psy­chi­a­try use the word “affect” as a noun, so you prob­a­bly don’t have to worry about it. An “effect” is pri­mar­ily some change, result or con­se­quence of an action, as in “She never paid atten­tion to the list of side effects.” This word also describes phe­nom­ena like “the Doppler effect.” It can be used in its verb form to mean insti­gate, bring about or cause, as in “The new croc­o­dile pond in the front yard effected a change in foot traffic.”

Con­trac­tions

If you’re ever in doubt about a homo­phone, think about what you’re try­ing to say. If you use a con­trac­tion, remem­ber that it’s a com­bi­na­tion of two words and that the apos­tro­phe sig­ni­fies a miss­ing let­ter. Con­fused about “your” vs. “you’re”? The lat­ter is a con­trac­tion and means “you are,” while the for­mer is pos­ses­sive. If you stop to think about the mean­ing of con­trac­tions, you can avoid many homo­phone mistakes.

Bio: Alexis Bonari is a free­lance writer and blog junkie. She often can be found blog­ging about gen­eral edu­ca­tion issues and col­lege schol­ar­ships. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gar­den­ing, swim­ming, and avoid­ing her laptop.

100 English Grammar Blogs Posts

If you are look­ing for an assort­ment of Eng­lish blog posts about every sort of topic related to gram­mar, spelling, and punc­tu­a­tion here it is:
100 Eng­lish Gram­mar Blog Posts

10 Tips for Improving Your English Spelling

This short arti­cle will show you easy ways for improv­ing your Eng­lish spelling. 10 Tips for the Spelling Challenged

More on Subject-Verb Agreement Rules

This clearly writ­ten arti­cle cov­ers the com­plex­i­ties of subject-verb agreement:

Subject-Verb Agree­ment Rules