Latest Articles from ELB
The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide – Free This Month
Continuing from the plan I laid out in my recent blog post, we're into the second month of me giving my grammar guides away free on the website. For all of October, you can now download The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide absolutely free. As a quick recap,...
Word Order in English Sentences – Free This Month
As promised in my most recent blog post, over the next four months I’m going to give away each of my books on this website, starting with Word Order in English Sentences. If you missed that post, I thought it time to put out the books a bit more freely, given that the...
Looking to the Future for ELB
Hello from ELB! It has been a little while, so I want to address my increasingly irregular updates. It’s with great regret that over these past few months I’ve been unable to continue my monthly new articles, which I’d otherwise managed without fail for 12 years....
Cutting Words with Efficient Verbs
If you want to say something with fewer words in English, it’s often possible to choose more specific vocabulary. When it comes to choosing your verbs, this can impact entire phrases. Today, I’m looking at a common issue in my fiction editing work, where we have verbs...
How to use Single or Double Quotation Marks
In English, we can indicate quoted text with either single quotes, ‘–’ or double quotes, “–”. Typically it is expected that you use one style or the other, but they can also be combined. This can lead to some confusion as to exactly when you should use double or...
How to Structure Sentences Logically
I often discuss breaking down sentence structure and word order to demonstrate how understanding sentence components helps provide flexibility with structure. You can use the full word order guide to help with this here. Today, though, I’d like to discuss cases when...
Using Pronouns and Determiners to Clarify General Plurals
Effective pronoun and determiner use in English can be tricky and very nuanced. I’ve already got a few articles on their uses here, where I’ve said it’s hard to learn from the rules alone. The issue I want to discuss here is when general plurals are used instead of...
The Origins of Christmas Words
Christmas is right around the corner, and as keen readers will know we like a good holiday here at ELB. Christmas is a holiday with deep and diverse historical roots, and the language surrounding it reflects this: while the name very clearly evokes the Christian...
Should you write “all right” or “alright”?
In today's new article I'm taking a look at the difference between 'all right' and 'alright', something which has come up a few times for me in my editing work and a point I've considered probably more than I should have in my own writing. It's possible (and somewhat...