by Phil Williams | Jun 14, 2022 | Definitions, Vocabulary
If you look hard enough, you’ll eventually find that almost all rules in English have exceptions and even contradictions. It’s a result of it being such an expansive and adaptive language. One of the most curious (and perhaps frustrating) areas of English that we can...
by Phil Williams | May 10, 2022 | Exercises, Writing skills
Ever since I released the book Advanced Writing Skills, I have been planning to produce some companion exercises to go with it. These would be writing prompts with model example answers provided. Now, I’ve finally produced some of these, which I intend to...
by Phil Williams | Apr 12, 2022 | Definitions, Grammar, Vocabulary, Words
I had an idea to discuss contronyms this month, which are a specific type of homonym, but I realised I don’t have an article on homonyms here. These are an interesting (and difficult) aspect of English, where we have a great many words that can either look or sound...
by Phil Williams | Mar 8, 2022 | Grammar
Confusion over plurals is a theme I’ve covered a few times, which can be surprising as it should be easy to say if a noun describes one thing or many. But we’ve seen how compound subjects can confuse, and likewise how qualifiers like “a lot” can cause confusion. A...
by Phil Williams | Feb 8, 2022 | Grammar
I’ve had a few queries lately asking for more information about using the future tenses in the past. This is used when we want to talk about events yet to occur but from a past perspective. This is a topic that was actually added to the later versions of The...