Latest Articles from ELB
Creating past event sequences with the past perfect
To give a little structure to the different examples of past tenses uses I’ve highlighted in some of my narrative articles, here’s a quick explanation of how the past perfect can be used to create past event sequences (adapted from The English Tenses Practical Grammar...
Short Halloween horror story – reading practice
Let’s get you in the mood for Halloween. The following is a quick reading practice that makes use of the words from my Halloween noun and adjectives lists. It is a short story about a haunted house – read through it and see which words you can spot from the lists....
Contractions and Different Tense Forms
The different English tenses use a delightfully wide variety of forms, in the simple, continuous, perfect and perfect continuous for the past, present, and future. And, on top of that, we use those forms in positive, negative, question and negative forms. Now, when we...
Making predictions with the future tense
One of the many uses of the future tenses in English is to make predictions – to suggest, or guess, something is likely to happen in the future. We usually make predictions with the future simple forms of will (It will be a good day.) or going to (Our team are going...
Nasty nouns for Halloween
As the end of October approaches, and all things creepy are upon us, it’s time to brush up on some more Halloween vocabulary. Having set the scene with our abysmal adjectives for Halloween, now it’s time to meet the cast of objects and creatures that populate the...
Choosing between the future continuous and future simple
As my series of articles about state has shown, with certain verbs there are some tricky areas in choosing between the simple and continuous forms in the past and present. Things are a little more flexible in the future (though flexibility does not necessarily make...
Identifying State Verbs – Simple or Continuous Exercise
The following exercise is designed to test your understanding of my series of articles about the simple tenses and state verbs. Remember, verbs that refer to conditions, emotions, possession and senses usually have simple tense uses, not continuous uses. Simple...
The Present Tenses and State Verbs
Following from my tips on the past simple and state verbs, and its comparison with the past continuous (based on extracts from The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide), this article will explain how the present tense works with states. As demonstrating states can...
Halloween vocabulary – abysmal adjectives
To get in the mood for Halloween, a favourite holiday in the UK and America, here’s a list of some useful adjectives to describe creepy scenarios! Perfect for building a scary scene and setting some devilish ambience – these are all adjectives with descriptions and...