All the chattering souls gathered at 5 Manderly Place to discuss the most pressing matters of the century. The address was an old one in...

Hello, and happy Thursday!  Amid the rest of the news in the world lately (and heaven knows there’s been plenty!), you might not have seen this little tidbit: the University of California recently voted to remove the SAT/ACT from its admissions requirements .  The news has caused many people to draw the (eminently logical) conclusion that they no longer need to prepare for the SAT. “No SAT means no SAT prep, right? I can just stop learning all this stuff?” WRONG! Listen to ep

I didn’t want to be a teacher. Not really.  But I’m not tall enough to be an actress, and my parents said I’d never make any money as a...

Fat Amy sneezed. Her fellow Bellas, singers from the premiere a cappella group at Barden University, shied back in a way they hadn’t...

We made it! Episode 18 of the Vocabbett podcast contains the final installment of our “5 Ways to Instantly Sound Smarter” mini-series. Seeing as it’s the last episode, I thought it might be time to change things up a bit. Rather than covering a grammar rule you should probably follow, this episode covers a “rule” you might want to break!  One of the often-repeated grammar rules in English is to "never end a sentence with a preposition." NEVER , they say. The grammarians who s

Back when I was teaching English, I used to describe grammar like this: Imagine that instead of a writer or speaker, you’re a painter. In order for anyone to know how talented you are, they’re going to have to see your paintings! But here’s the thing: if you hang your paintings in a fancy Manhattan art gallery, your work is going to come across a lot more valuable than if you hide everything at the bottom of your closet. HOW YOU PRESENT YOUR WORK MATTERS. And guess what? YOUR

I'm going to give you a few sentences, and I want you to see if you can spot the error: “There’s so many things I have to do today.” “There’s a lot of really good options here.” “There’s ten things on this menu I want to order.” NOW, EVEN IF YOU DIDN’T SPOT THE ERROR, YOU PROBABLY NOTICED A RECURRING THEME THROUGHOUT THESE SENTENCES: “THERE’S.” “There’s” is absolutely a word, and it’s grammatically correct in many, many contexts! However, let’s just remind ourselves of what i

For years, I meandered blithely through life thinking that “less” and “fewer” meant the same thing. For the sake of convenience, I used “less” for everything…less cars, less people, less things to do… Now? I shudder at the thought. So, are you ready to learn tip two on how to instantly sound smarter? Fewer is for anything you can count. Less is for anything you can’t count. So it’s  actually FEWER cars, FEWER people, and FEWER things to do, since you can count all of those

I am SO excited about this podcast because it kicks off a mini-series called “5 Ways to Instantly Sound Smarter.” In it, we’re going over 5 of the most common grammatical mistakes that—for better or worse—people get rather judgmental about. And don’t worry. I’m not going to be like, “To fix this, go buy a copy of the MLA Handbook.” Ugh. No. We can fix each issue in the length of a podcast, and I’ll do my best to make them easy to remember! THE FIRST WAY TO INSTANTLY SOUND SMA