Latest Articles from ELB
The Brown House Ghoul – Halloween Reading/Tenses Exercise
It’s October, which means it’s time for another Halloween-themed article! This year, I’ve gone with a tenses/reading exercise again; you can enjoy this just for the reading practice, to see some Halloween English in use, or you can test yourself on the most...
What are prefixes and why is it useful to know about them?
When it comes to studying vocabulary, it's worth knowing how words can be broken down or how they are formed. One of the structures that can help form words is a prefix – simply, any letters that appear before the root of a word. Prefixes can be used before many words...
When do language rules matter in English?
As I mentioned in my last article on the difference between objective and subjective, I’d like to share some thoughts on when language rules should be strictly followed and when they may be flexible. This is essentially the difference between objective (provably true)...
What’s the difference between objective and subjective?
I had an idea to write an article discussing the difference between flexible and inflexible language rules, and when it matters to be precise or not. This is a broad and nuanced topic, which veers into matters of opinion, and I realised first it would be more useful...
Commas in Use: an Exercise
I’ve been mostly editing books lately, so a lot of my focus has been on little details of English in written work. A frequent topic for inconsistencies or complications is commas, hence I have produced a full group of articles about them on this site. I was going to...
English Idioms & Sayings: Exercise 3
I have finally completed my Idioms and Sayings series with a third exercise covering some common expressions in English. Sorry it’s taken me a couple of years to get back to this – it’s mostly because I forgot, but also the rest of the list went missing! As a...
The Big ELB Business Vocabulary List
I used to work in business writing (or writing copy, as we call functional English text), and ran a website with articles about this, which some of you may remember. That website is now gone but I still have a lot of articles saved, which I've been meaning to revise...
The Power of -Y, A Common English Suffix
I’ve touched on prefixes and suffixes a little in the past, and when I was asked if it’s possible to form adjectives from verbs it made me think of a suffix that deserves an article of its own: -y. The letter -y appears at the end of many words in English, but can...
Using Commas with Adverbials
Reaching the end of my series on commas, here's another brief extract from Advanced Writing Skills for Students of English to look at how commas are used with adverbial phrases. This fits into my wider guide to commas that I've been adding to on the site; you can find...