by Phil Williams | Oct 11, 2022 | Exercises, Grammar
It’s October which means it’s Spooky Season, and time for another themed article. Today, we’re going to practice relative clauses with a Halloween theme. For a quick introduction, relative clauses are clauses that add additional detail to nouns. They are connected by...
by Phil Williams | Sep 13, 2022 | Definitions, Grammar
When discussing grammar, nouns can be described as either countable or uncountable. I’ve been meaning to cover this for a while, as we’ve got a few articles relating to these definitions but not one that defines them, and describes what to look out for. After some...
by Phil Williams | Aug 9, 2022 | Grammar
A while ago, I began a series of articles to show how each tense can be combined with the other tenses, but we only covered the past tenses (with the past simple and continuous here and the past perfects here). The idea was to demonstrate how a single aspect can...
by Phil Williams | Jul 12, 2022 | Exercises, Writing skills
Following on from my recent writing exercise for a letter of local investment, I’ve got another exercise today covering a topic that affects everyone at some point: a letter of complaint. The task here specifically concerns something ordered online, which we all...
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...
by Phil Williams | Jan 11, 2022 | Definitions, Exercises, Vocabulary, Words
Time for another comparisons / common mistakes post, as I had a few requests towards the end of last year regarding some commonly confused words. Today’s ones look very similar (and can sound very similar) but have very different meanings, so they’re good...