Latest Articles from ELB
Reading Exercise & Analysis: Novel Opening 1
I’m trying something new today with a reading analysis exercise, taking an extract of writing and picking out particulars of language that might be interesting. I’ve provided questions below to help you think critically about the English involved. The answers follow....
Future Tenses Exercise II: choosing from mixed future tenses
Given the popularity of this future tenses exercise, I thought it would be good to expand on that with another in the same format. As before, in the following exercise, complete the sentences choosing the correct future tense form for the verb in brackets. The future...
Understanding Present Perfect States Without Times
I had a question recently asking about how to use the present perfect without durational adverbs, such as “for” or “since”. There are some examples of this in The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide, but I thought it would be useful to expand on the concept....
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...