r/grammar

Hi, I made this one. I've played Wordle-likes for years and always wanted to build my own, but I never had an idea that felt like mine.

The push came from a strange place. Half of what I read these days is written by AI, and it's never short. Every email, every doc, twelve words where five would do. At some point I said the phrase out loud, long story short, and realised it was a game.

So: you get a twelve-word sentence. You rephrase it in exactly five of its own words. Real English, same meaning, your job is to work out which words carry the sentence and which are just dressed up to look important. Scoring is Wordle style, blue for right word in the right spot, orange for in the answer but elsewhere, grey for out. Five tries, one sentence a day.

My wife and my brother were the playtesters. An early version let "the" beat proper words in the answer, which felt awful to lose to, so the answers now always favour the concrete word. That one change ate a whole weekend.

My coworker and I were having a conversation where he made the statement "my wife and I rode bike". I informed him on how awful that sounds and the correct way to say it would to be "we rode bikes" with an s on the end of bike. He vehemently disagreed and another coworker chimed in agreeing with him. Are they right? And why does it sound so awful to my ears to hear it their way?

>In short, careful research was the first step in writing a successful essay, Smith wrote.

In this sentence, Smith actually wrote that careful research is the first step, and this rule has not expired at the time of my writing, so this makes more sense:

>In short, careful research is the first step in writing a successful essay, Smith wrote.

However, she didn't use those exact words so I can't put it in quotation marks. Is the second formulation OK?

"Is it safe?" Astrotrain asked. 

Typically, energon cubes were always safe to consume no matter what energy source was used to make them, but that could just as easily mean that nobody had found something that was toxic after the conversion process.

OR

"Is it safe?" Astrotrain asked. Typically, energon cubes . . . (and so on).

This is one of the biggest issues when it comes to me and writing; I feel like I split up things that could be combined so that it doesn't look like just single lines of text across a screen (they can look like actual paragraphs).

I'm pretty sure the stories I have chapters up for are already full of these. Any advice?

Words like somewhere, someone, whoever, and foremost, are all words that are very obviously made of other words. My friend corrected me when I said “some one” instead of someone and I said “That isn’t wrong because it’s a compound word” and I want to know if I or they are correct.

The king was betrayed by the treachery of his closest advisor.

Because we are using betrayed and treachery in the same Sentence

opposite of nonchalant?

Today I saw a guy wearing a T-shirt that said 'more trees, less idiots.' Do you think he understands irony?

I'm trying to write"... easy access to both business and pleasure-centered areas of the city."

Should this be written as

A) "business- and pleasure-centered"

B) "business and pleasure centered"

C) "business and pleasure-centered"

maybe even

D) "business- and pleasure- centered"

I think it's C. I'm not really sure though, maybe it's D.

Anybody know?

I'll have a paragraph finished and then spend forever on one sentence.

Move a word.

Change the tense.

Remove a comma.

Put the comma back.

Eventually I don't even know what sounds right anymore.

Does anyone else feel this way?

Writing a short story and not sure if I'm using a semicolon properly in the following sentence:

>Something was amiss, but he couldn’t figure out exactly what it was. It was like recognizing someone from the past, but not being able to remember their name; or hearing a song that that is stuck in a person’s head where they can’t quite remember the words.

Input would be appreciated!

Being politically correct I shouldn't [say that]

or

Being politically correct I shouldn't [say that]

Briefly, in a quoted sentence which appears in italics, I have added my own square-bracketed clarifying words but don't know if I italicise them too.

This is a style query rather than grammar or punctuation - had a look but did not see the 'style' sub ...is there one?

I get that the -y in fluffy makes fluffy an adjective, and in an example like “quick” vs “quickly” the -ly is turning quick into an adverb.

So why does the word “scholar,” a noun, use -ly and not -y to turn it into an adjective?

I don’t study linguistics. I just got thinking about it and I can’t find the answer online. Please don’t be mean to me.

My mom and I were discussing some sort of science-related topic (as I unsurprisingly forgot what it was even if we were talking five minutes ago). I said, "What is the taxidermy behind this?", and she started explaining what "taxidermy" meant to me. Of course, I'm no English specialist, as I'm a teenage minor, so I have no idea what that word meant. I started to wonder what the word I actually meant was, since I heard the phrase, "What is the taxidermy behind this?" somewhere online (for clarification, we searched Google and Google said it was some sort of autocorrect).

The word I'm looking for is science-related, but it's not typical vocabulary like "reason", "method", "thought process", etc.. It's advanced vocabulary, and, iirc, it started with either a "T" or "S" (if not, one of those letters are somewhere embedded in the word). It wasn't "situation", as it was a more complex word than that.

Please lmk if you have any suggestions!!

p.s. I'm on computer, so I apologize for any spelling mistakes

I have used this bike for 3 years

I asked chat gpt, and it said it was better to use

I have been using this bike for 3 years

And this one

Why is my sentence wrong?

I have gone to school for 9 years .

And can i use yesterday with present perfect ?

Like

I haven't gone to the park since yesterday

?

“I ended up spending two hours there tasting different teas.”

or

“I ended up spending two hours there to taste different teas.”

I could also use “staying for two hours”

Thanks a lot :)

I'm doing work for a magazine that's talking about honoring scholarship students. Each spotlight comes with a comment or two from each one.

One said this: "UHS (their school name) and everyone have helped me grow."

My editor told me that it's "has" and not "have" but I don't think so.

For one, there are two distinct groups here: the school and everyone (yes, I guess "school" is a part of "everyone" but that's what the student said) so I think it's "have" but I couldn't find anything concrete about 2 group nouns and the appropriate word to use in relation.