Language Ninja

Having a friend or family member lose a loved one is always devastating and delicate. According to a WebMD survey, “ Grief: Beyond the 5 Stages ,” respondents experienced sadness (84%) and depression (41%) following the death of a loved one.  It’s a natural response to want to console someone who’s experienced a loss, but this difficult time may leave you feeling lost about how to soothe a grieving friend or relative. Finding the right words that offer meaningful sympathy can be challenging. For example, commonly used phrases like “My condolences” might not accurately convey your earnest support for someone in mourning. Below are five alternative ways to say “I’m sorry for your loss,” whether you’re consoling someone in person, writing an email or card, or sending a text message.  1 “Losing someone you love is so hard. It’s OK to not be OK.” A trite expression to say to someone who’s grieving is “be strong.” It’s well-meaning but it can be problematic. It could unintentionally p...

Too often, business leaders make trade-offs between the quality and efficiency of communication. Focusing on quality can lead to delays in response and production time, while pressing for speed hinders high-caliber experiences that build trust and loyalty. With Grammarly Business, every business can turn communication into a competitive advantage. With features that support the quality, consistency, and efficiency of communication, trade-offs are a thing of the past. Today, we’re proud to share new industry accolades that reinforce Grammarly Business as the leading writing assistant driving greater business results through effective communication.  Grammarly Business named a leader in three G2 reports, awarded a Users Love Us badge Building on recognition we earned in January 2020 , G2.com, Inc. (G2) has named Grammarly Business a leader in three G2 Summer 2021 Grid ® Reports : Grid ® Report for AI Writing Assistant Software and Small-Business Grid ® Report for AI Writing A...

When it comes to customer-facing communications, businesses shouldn’t have to trade quality for speed. After all, you need both for five-star customer experiences. Delivering great customer experiences correlates with increased sales and retention , according to research by Deloitte. Plus, as any sales, marketing, or customer support leader will tell you, meeting efficiency quotas and KPIs is an essential part of team success.  That’s why we’re excited to introduce snippets from Grammarly Business.  This new feature will help teams everywhere increase their writing speed by giving them the ability to use pre-written phrases everywhere they write, at the touch of a button. Here’s how snippets work: Effortlessly insert snippets in-line while writing. Snippets can be as short as a phrase or as long as whole passages or paragraphs. Leaders and approved contributors can create and manage a snippet library. Individuals can also create personal snippets instantly. Capture new snippets...

This article was co-written by Grammarly Applied Research Scientists Kostiantyn Omelianchuk, Vipul Raheja, and Oleksandr Skurzhanskyi. Grammarly’s goal is to improve communication for everyone, and part of that is helping people understand text that may be convoluted or complicated to read. Machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), which are central to Grammarly’s mission , can help by taking a complex piece of text and converting it into a simpler form. Text simplification can be applied to any piece of communication, from research papers to emails.  Many text simplification solutions coming out of the NLP research community use black-box neural network models to perform autoregressive generation: They take a complex sentence and try to sequentially predict each word in the simplified version. These models can take a long time to make predictions and require large amounts of data. Seeking a more efficient and scalable approach, Grammarly’s research team experimen...

Miss, Mrs., Ms., and Mx. are not interchangeable terms. Addressing someone with the wrong title can cause offense, so it’s important to know the difference between these four options. The guide below will describe how they’ve been used traditionally and how to consider using them now. Here’s a general rule of thumb: If someone tells you they prefer a particular title, that’s the one you should use to address them. Miss “Miss”, when attached to a name, has been a title of respect for a female child and an unmarried woman. It has been used by itself (as a term of address) or combined with a name, a descriptor of a prominent characteristic, or something the person represents. Miss Penelope Edwards won the spelling bee. Excuse me, Miss . You dropped your bag. Aren’t you Miss Jacobs from down the street ? You’re certainly Miss Congeniality today. Traditionally, in a formal setting, people would use “Miss” along with an unmarried woman’s last name, regardless of how well they k...

Sometimes, writing feels like you’re climbing up a hill. A slippery, muddy hill. During a rainstorm.  Even when the words are there, it can be tough to get the feeling onto the page. You might have listed the events you’re covering and presented all the facts clearly and logically, but when your writing doesn’t feel engaging, something’s missing. That something is descriptive writing.  Give your writing extra polish Grammarly helps you communicate clearly Write with Grammarly Descriptive writing consists of a variety of techniques and choices you make in an effort to give your reader an accurate, three-dimensional impression of the subject you’re writing about. It’s part word choice , part figurative language, part comparison, and part knowing what to include and what to leave out of your writing to set just the right mood . When to use descriptive writing Use descriptive writing almost anywhere your writing can benefit from immersive scen...

Pearson and BBC Live Classes began in 2018. The project encourages different nationalities, races and religions to come together and communicate in English. What’s more, it is free and open to students aged between 9 and 19 years old. Our goal was to create a multicultural experience that would connect people from all over the world who have a passion for learning. When we began the third annual program of Pearson and BBC Live Classes 2020/2021 on 15th October 2020, British Council ELTons named us as the winner of the Innovation in Learner Resources award . I was so proud of the team and it was an incredible boost to everyone involved.  So far, 2,500 schools from 81 countries have participated in a Live Class and the project has grown beyond my wildest expectations. In 2020/2021 alone we ran 250 global lessons to 35,000 students.  Ever since the first Live Class, I’ve seen that there is a great passion for learning across the globe. I’ve been watching motivated students speaking En...

Every class is unique. Students have different needs, motivation levels, abilities, and goals. To facilitate an inclusive, effective learning environment, teachers, therefore, need to be flexible and adapt to their teaching to each group and each individual.    We’ve been exploring the topic of flexibility as part of  Pearson’s live training  for exam Teachers. Participants have attended demonstration classes for  semi-intensive and extensive groups using Formula B2 First Coursebook. They have come away with a firm idea of how to adapt classes for their courses in the future.   The  Formula B2 First Coursebook  is a  versatile teaching resource. It gives educators the content and tools they need to deliver English language lessons to diverse groups of students, across a variety of course lengths.   Let’s look at what they learned in the live training sessions.    A look at live lesson aims   Participants chose whether to attend a single demonstration class from a semi-intensive ...