Language Ninja

In English grammar, an indirect object is the word or phrase that receives the direct object. In the sentence The teacher gave the students cake , the indirect object is the students . The direct object is cake , and the students are the ones who eat it.  If you’re confused about what an indirect object is, you’re not alone! Indirect objects are particularly difficult to understand because they’re so closely related to direct objects . This guide clears everything up, with a lot of indirect object examples so you can see how they work.  What is an indirect object? Indirect objects are easier to understand if you know what direct objects are. A direct object is the noun that receives the action of the verb . The indirect object, however, is the noun that receives the direct object itself.  Embiid passed Simmons the ball.  In this sentence, passed is the verb and Embiid is the subject because he’s the one doing the passing. The direct object is the ball because it is the thing...

This article was co-written by Machine Learning Engineer Karun Singh and Product Manager Dru Knox. How do you know if the main points of your email are coming across to your reader? Or that your reader is absorbing the right information? Not knowing if your message will connect with your audience is a problem we’re passionate about solving at Grammarly. With this goal, our team of experts in machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and computational linguistics recently focused on how we can help users feel confident they’re conveying the key ideas of their emails. Shape the way millions of people communicate! Open Roles To break down this problem, we posed two questions:  1   What are the main points of your email?   2   What parts of the email is the reader going to pay attention to? (If your main points aren’t receiving enough attention, the reader may miss something important.) We used NLP and ML to find and highligh...

In business as in life, miscommunications are commonplace enough that it’s easy to write them off as one-time mistakes instead of symptoms of a more systemic problem. Yet communication barriers in business cost an average of $62.4 million annually, whereas companies with more effective communication practices produce up to 47% higher returns to shareholders. Common miscommunications scenarios in business include a “company-wide” email that reaches all but one team, a meeting that creates more issues than it resolves, and a social media post that should have been a blog article, to name a few. Better Results Through Better Communication Get your teams on the same page with style guides Get Started Avoiding the high cost of poor communication means identifying the most significant barriers to effective business communication and taking steps to overcome them. First things first: Let’s take a look at what a communication barrier is and what typ...

Reading Time: 4 minutes Did you know that there are more than 7,000 languages currently spoken around the world?  This means that within each country, there are multiple languages that are commonly used—and some countries even have several hundred!  Let’s take a look at the top four countries with the highest number of languages: Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Nigeria, and India. Papua New Guinea Official languages: 3 (Tok Pisin, Hiri Motu, English) Total languages: 840 Total population: Estimated 8.7 million people Papua New Guinea, an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, is the most multilingual country on Earth . With just under 9 million people, there are 840 active languages spoken every day! Of these, approximately 550 are “Papuan” languages. These are the oldest group of languages in Papua New Guinea, and have been developing for around 40,000 years. These languages don’t share a single root, and are instead split into do...

Throughout your academic career, you’ll write a lot of essays . And you’ll probably write a lot of different types of essays, such as analytical and argumentative essays. Different kinds of essays require different skills, like infusing figurative language into a personal essay to help it come alive or critically thinking through a multifaceted problem in an analytical essay to reach a solution. Essays vary in length and structure , too, with some spanning pages and others fitting neatly into just a few paragraphs.   Get to know these seven types of essays before you’re assigned to write them. Understanding how they’re different—and how they’re the same—will turn you into an expert essayist. Give your essays extra polish Grammarly helps strengthen your academic writing Write with Grammarly The four main types of writing In many of the online resources you’ll find about the types of essays, you’ll find references to the four main types of wri...

The new academic year is fast approaching and we’re getting ready to head back to the English classroom! Yet, after a long and relaxing summer holiday, some students may be feeling unmotivated to go back to the same class routine, especially if they have been learning English for several years. So how can we reinspire students to keep learning and reconnect with English? By bringing in new resources, learning approaches and targets, we are sure you’ll be able to rekindle their love of learning.   So let’s look at five ways you can reinspire your students in the coming academic year.   1. Set new goals   Students may lose interest in classes or feel discouraged when they don’t have a clear target to work towards. If this is the case with your class, have them write up a list of five new goals they’d like to achieve.    It’s crucial that these goals are  SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely . So rather than just saying “I’d like to learn more vocabulary”, hav...

Teachers and parents from around the world talk about how they feel about the new school year. Soon, many students and teachers will be going back to school for another year, which cannot be fully predicted or planned with Covid-19 still a worldwide concern. How do parents feel, how will they support their kids and what lessons have they learned from their previous experiences? And what about teachers? Are they excited, or perhaps, anxious? What challenges do they anticipate facing? Let’s see what they have to say about the upcoming school year. Concerned voices of parents “We are prepared for online education to be a part of our everyday lives, and to stay with us for good.” Anna, a parent of a first grader, Poland My daughter starts first grade this September. We are prepared for online education to be a part of our everyday lives, and to stay with us for good. Luckily, we have a lot of experience from pre-school and my child has been trained in having online lessons, though...