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...Future Tenses Exercise II: choosing from mixed future tenses
Given the popularity of this future tenses exercise, I thought it would be good to expand on that with another in the same format. As before, in the following exercise, complete the sentences choosing the correct future tense form for the verb in brackets. The future...
Understanding Present Perfect States Without Times
I had a question recently asking about how to use the present perfect without durational adverbs, such as “for” or “since”. There are some examples of this in The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide, but I thought it would be useful to expand on the concept....Want to Master English?
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