Latest Articles from ELB
Broad and Implied Negatives: Negative Sentences Without Negative Words
I’ve had an interesting correspondence with a reader who identified an implied negative which is rarely explored in grammar guides – where a negative sentence is created without any explicitly negative words. These can be more difficult to spot than regular negatives,...
What’s the difference between “it’s” and “its”?
Here’s an issue that confuses native English speakers: when and where to use an apostrophe with it. This has been covered a lot online, because these two words are very commonly confused, but I still get asked about it so hope my own explanation might reach a few more...
Mixed Past Tense Exercise: Sentence Matching
Today, we're taking another look at the tenses with a short mixed past tenses exercise. This one's a little different to the usual gap-fills or scrambles that I've posted in the past, as it uses a sentence pairing style. It's taken from The English Tenses Exercise...
What’s the Difference Between “any more” and “anymore”?
It’s been a while since I did a comparisons / common mistakes post, but the difference between “any more” and “anymore” is one that I’ve seen quite a lot lately. In fact, I sometimes stop and think about it myself when writing, because their meanings are closely...
Word Order in English Sentences: A Complete Guide
Welcome to the ELB Guide to English Word Order and Sentence Structure. This article provides a complete introduction to sentence structure, parts of speech and different sentence types, adapted from the bestselling grammar guide, Word Order in English Sentences. I’ve...
The True Treasure of Christmas: Phrasal Verbs Exercise
It's that time of year again, with Christmas quickly coming and a great excuse to add some seasonal language exercises. Today, I'm sharing a new short story gap-fill exercise to test understanding of phrasal verbs, to go with the list I'm developing here. This...
ELB Phrasal Verbs Master List: Grammar, Definitions and Examples for 400+ Verbs
Welcome to ELB phrasal master guide. This article explains the purpose and grammar of phrasal verbs, and describes how they fit into sentences (as adapted from the book Word Order In English Sentences). It also provides a list of phrasal verbs with definitions and...
Introducing the ELB Store!
I’m proud to announce the reopening of the English Lessons Brighton store, making my grammar guides and more available directly from this website. Please give it a look! In the early days of ELB I experimented with selling books directly on the website but took the...
Different Types of Language Varieties
I’ve had a few blog comments lately addressing how English is used or taught differently, and thought it would be a useful exercise to produce an article covering how we discuss varieties of a language. Some of the most active articles I have are ones where people...