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Articles by Daniel Potter
How One Amazing Fossil Is Upending Our Understanding of Ankylosaur Behavior
Note: Dr. David Evans will be a keynote speaker at NHMU's DinoFest: Damage & Defense on January 27-28, 2024. Learn more and prebook DinoFest tickets here. By Daniel Potter For paleontologists trying to tease hints from fossils mangled by geologic time, insights into the activities of a particular dinosaur are precious. Consider the ankylosaur, a four-legged Cretaceous plant-eater known for its armor plates and hefty club-like tail.
Game Design: Game Review (Street Fighter Alpha 2 (Euro 960229)
This was my very first playtest experience of Street Fighter Alpha Two. I started on the site https://archive.org/details/internetarcade in order to find an arcade game to my liking and stumbled across this old gem.
4 Ways Grammarly Helps Freelancers Edit and Polish Their Work
A freelance writer whose business depends on delivering sparkling prose faces several unique challenges beyond the immutable truth that writing well is rarely easy. Your humble blogger notes this from experience, having spent years writing everything from podcast scripts to science posts about sea otters to business proposals. I know better than most how sitting alone on a couch and sighing at a laptop can be work.
7 Ways Grammarly Helps Improve Your Texts
You probably send a lot of text messages. Occasionally, you might wish you could unsend a few, too, in those all-too-familiar cases where your phone’s basic autocorrect function falls short. Maybe it was a glaring accidental word swap in what was supposed to be a quick text to your landlord. Or you wish you’d been a bit more formal in a status update to your boss.
How to Create a Strong Writing Portfolio
“Show, don’t tell,” the writerly dictum goes. Don’t just tell readers your main character was intrigued—use your words to show me the look on her face. Don’t just say the island was beautiful—paint a word picture of turquoise waves and gently swaying palms. Similar advice holds when you say you’re a writer. Don’t just tell folks that—show what a crafty and capable wordsmith you are with a well-rounded writing portfolio.
Reply-All: How to Respond to a Group Email with Confidence
The reply-all function is a mixed blessing. It can be an essential part of your daily email routine, but if you’re careless, it can also be an easy way to embarrass yourself in front of your manager, colleagues, professional contacts, and even strangers. Knowing when and how to best use reply-all is key to succeeding at, well, pretty much anything that involves sending email, like client outreach, internal communications, or planning a team outing.
How to Create a Professional Linkedin Profile
You’ve probably heard that having a solid presence on LinkedIn can help advance your career by expanding your network and attracting new opportunities. Then again, writing and updating your profile might also cause you to second-guess yourself as you try to fill out each section perfectly in the hope of impressing the right prospective employer. Understandably, many of us dread this process. Elegantly summing up your training and experience takes time and careful thought.
8 Phrases to Spring-Clean from Your Emails
Bad writing habits have a way of piling up like household clutter. It’s worthwhile to periodically cull one’s accumulation of surplus coffee mugs and forgettable T-shirts, so why not take similar stock to rid your emails of a few clichés and deeply “meh” workplace expressions? We should admit we’re guilty too: It turns out calling clichés “threadbare” is itself something of a cliché, so we deleted that.
7 Work Phrases That Don’t Make Sense in a Remote World
Many millions of people switched to remote work at the onset of the pandemic, perhaps returning to the office only briefly since then to grab our desk photos and surviving houseplants. Maybe some have been returning to the office routine here and there. But in the meantime, many folks still find themselves habitually using a lot of workplace phrases that, upon reflection, seem laughably nonsensical or even antiquated.
Reconsider Ghosting—Here’s How to Respectfully Withdraw
Here’s an underrated skill: finding the words to politely withdraw from a situation or relationship without ghosting. Even if you’ve never heard the term “ghosting” before, you’ve likely encountered it—and perhaps dabbled in it yourself. Ghosting is when you stop communicating and disappear from a relationship—personal or professional. Maybe you were close to getting a job offer or picking up “let’s get serious” energy from someone you weren’t that into and opted to silently peace out.
The Unmaking of the White Christian Worldview
By Robert P. Jones As I came of age in Woodville Heights Baptist Church, on the white working-class side of Jackson, Miss., I internalized a cycle of sin, confession and repentance as a daily part of my life. Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, this was a double inheritance. Beneath this seemingly icy surface of guilt and culpability flowed a deeper current of innocence and entitlement. Individually, I was a sinner, but collectively, I was part of a special tribe.
Starting Your Career? Here’s How to Graduate from Academic to Professional Writing
Congrats! It took years of discipline, including maybe more than your fair share of all-nighters during finals, but you did it—you handed in your last college paper. Along your scholarly journey, you probably got used to writing in an academic style. But things will change as you begin your job search and transition to writing in professional settings. From formatting to length to tone to vocabulary, writing for your job will differ from writing for your professors.
24 Wordplay-Based Jokes That Make Us Giggle
At Grammarly, we think about putting words together like it’s our job, and that’s because, well, it is. So it’s probably no surprise that we love jokes involving wordplay—or better yet, jokes about words themselves. And we’re not above the occasional admittedly cringey dad joke. So get ready for some bookish humor: We’ve rounded up a few of our favorite word-based jokes and puns. Comedic timing 1 The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense. 2 Can February March?
Socializing Post-Pandemic: How to Not Make It Awkward
There’s a decent chance some of your in-person social skills have gotten rusty over the last year—and you’re not alone. Just consider how long it’s been since you first ran across the verb “doomscrolling.” It may have been that long ago or more since you last went to a barbecue and caught up with your friends, hugged your loved ones, or made polite chit-chat with coworkers—or for that matter, with strangers. Do you even remember how to do that stuff?
Graduation Speech Examples That Impart Life Lessons
It’s graduation season! As so many bright and hard-working grads shift their tassels from right to left in graduation ceremonies live and virtual, we’re celebrating—and reflecting on life lessons communicated in commencement addresses. Some universities attract big names to offer words of wisdom at graduation ceremonies, including literal rock stars, journalistic luminaries, and even former presidents. Indeed, some of their most memorable and powerful remarks have become timeless.
Common Clichés and How to Avoid Them in Your Writing
There are many distinctive features of masterly writing, and clichés aren’t among them. Clichés are stock phrases that you read so commonly they’re almost meaningless, like “clear as a bell” or “the fact of the matter.” Such phrases bore attentive readers and can suggest laziness or even a lack of originality. So it’s wise to avoid clichés in your writing—either by striking them outright or reworking your ideas to make them more your own.
Don’t Make These Mistakes When Messaging on the Go
Admit it: You’re guilty of distractedly dashing off the occasional text message—or, gasp, work email—that didn’t quite make sense. Maybe you were busy, in a rush, or thinking about something else. In hindsight, it’s a little awkward that you told your mom you needed to “level-set expectations” ahead of Thanksgiving.
The Dos and Don’ts of Remote Work Etiquette
If you’ve shifted to remote work over the last year, you’ve undoubtedly had to recalibrate your approach to professional communications and relations. After a few months of adapting, the best etiquette and processes for interacting remotely with colleagues are becoming clear. Core to these new best practices is empathy, which is central to kindness. Understanding your coworkers and their perspectives also helps foster an enjoyable workplace—even when it also happens to be your living room.
What Is Irony in Writing? Common Types and Examples
The protagonist in your story has waited all week for a check to come in the mail. Now they open up their mailbox, spy an envelope that looks promising, and eagerly tear it open to discover the exact bill they didn’t want to see. Argh and hello, cursed daggers of irony. (Okay, maybe that last sentence is a bit dramatic, but so are many of the writerly applications of irony. Gird thyself.) Widespread but widely misunderstood, irony turns an audience’s expectation on its face.
The 2020 Buzzwords and Phrases We’re Putting in the Rearview
When a TV show that had plotted out whole future seasons is suddenly canceled, the writers sometimes go maximum rip for the finale, cramming what were meant to be sweeping arcs into a handful of absurdly overstuffed episodes. 2020 has felt like that. And while we realize turning the calendar to 2021 can’t magically reboot everything overnight, we’re hopeful things gradually improve. One modest dream we have involves retiring a few of the year’s more grating turns of phrase.
How to Achieve a Confident Tone in Writing
In writing, confidence is power. This may not come naturally if you feel out of your depth or intimidated by your audience. But finding the right tone to convey authority and self-assurance is worth your effort. By making adjustments to achieve a confident tone, you can put the people you’re writing to at ease: This writer exudes expertise and trustworthiness; I want to work with them. In other words, your ability to write confidently can help land you a job interview or raise.
12 Business Jargon Phrases People Love to Hate
When humans get together in groups, they tend to develop new lexicons specific to the context. Certain Hogwarts wizards complain about “muggles,” high schoolers aspire to “squad goals,” and occasionally a mid-level manager stares fervently into your eyes and tells you there’s an opportunity to “redefine the narrative.” Indeed, modern business jargon can feel like a tangled mess of lifeless metaphors and stale clichés that confuse more than clarify.
How to End a Business Letter: 10 Best Letter Closings
You’re almost there. You’re nearly through drafting a formal letter. It’s not something you make a practice of every day—maybe it’s rare for you to go hundreds of words without an emoji—so this accomplishment will soon be cause for relief, or even celebration. But first, there’s this pesky letter closing to hammer out. How do you find ways to end a letter, anyway? Here’s a tip: Want to make sure your writing shines? Grammarly can check your spelling and save you from grammar and punctuation mistakes.
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