Latest Articles from ELB
Kate Skates at Christmas: Phrasal Verbs Exercise
Christmas is nearly upon us again, so it’s time for another holiday-themed exercise to get you in the merry spirit. I’ve decided to revisit the same style of exercise I produced for Christmas last year: a short story gap-fill exercise to test your understanding of...
Using Commas with Lists & the Serial Comma
Today I’m going to look at another specific use of commas in English, particularly how we use them in lists, and how the controversial serial comma or Oxford comma works. This builds on a couple of articles about specific uses of commas that I’ve shared in the past:...
Spooky Relative Clauses: A Halloween Exercise
It’s October which means it’s Spooky Season, and time for another themed article. Today, we’re going to practice relative clauses with a Halloween theme. For a quick introduction, relative clauses are clauses that add additional detail to nouns. They are connected by...
What Are Countable and Uncountable Nouns?
When discussing grammar, nouns can be described as either countable or uncountable. I’ve been meaning to cover this for a while, as we’ve got a few articles relating to these definitions but not one that defines them, and describes what to look out for. After some...
Combing Different Tenses 3: The Present Simple
A while ago, I began a series of articles to show how each tense can be combined with the other tenses, but we only covered the past tenses (with the past simple and continuous here and the past perfects here). The idea was to demonstrate how a single aspect can...
Writing Exercise: Letter of Complaint
Following on from my recent writing exercise for a letter of local investment, I've got another exercise today covering a topic that affects everyone at some point: a letter of complaint. The task here specifically concerns something ordered online, which we all do...
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 release as a...
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...