Contronyms – words that are their own opposites
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...
Writing Exercise: Local Investment Letter
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...
What are homonyms, heterographs and heteronyms?
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...
Group Nouns and Plural Complements
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...
Grammar of the Future in the Past
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...
What’s the difference between accept, except and expect?
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...
Reading Exercise: A Christmas Carol
With Christmas fast approaching, it’s time for another holiday-themed exercise! Today, I’m continuing my advanced reading exercise series with the opening from a very famous Christmas story, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I previously discussed the cultural...
The English Tenses’ 10,000 Book Journey
It has finally happened: The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide has reached 10,000 global sales and I could not be happier! 10,000 is an arbitrary number, admittedly, but it’s a high one, and was always a personal target of mine. I thought, if I reach that, then...
English Idioms & Sayings: Exercise 2
This is a continuation of my Idioms and Sayings exercise series, which I started last month. As a reminder, I’ve put together a list of 45 interesting, popular sayings which I’m putting into 3 short exercises, with the third one to come soon. Check the first exercise...Want to Master English?
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