In our rush to write perfect English, we should perhaps pause for a moment and consider the importance of style. Whilst some words and phrases are quite clearly wrong, there are occasions when style can legitimately overrule supposedly correct sentence structure. Just because a sentence disobeys one or more rules, it is not necessarily badly [...]
Avoid These Common Mistakes
Could of; Could have; Could’ve How many times have you seen someone write ‘I could of done better’, ‘I should of taken greater care’, ‘I might of been late’. All are very common – but all are very wrong! They should read ‘I could have done better’, ‘I should have taken greater care’, ‘I might [...]
Conjunctions and Interjections
Conjunctions and Interjections There are eight ‘Parts of Speech’. We’ve had a quick look at nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs,pronouns and prepositions. Finally we come to conjunctions and interjections. Neither of them are particularly difficult to understand, but they play important roles when you are trying to learn how to write good English. CONJUNCTIONS are joining [...]
Pronouns and Prepositions
Pronouns and Prepositions We come now to pronouns and prepositions – important parts of speech when you’re learning how to write good English. PRONOUNS, as the name suggests, are used instead of nouns – they are pro-nouns. They help us simplify sentences by avoiding repetition. It would be clumsy to write “John sat down at [...]
Adjectives and Adverbs
Adjectives and adverbs We saw in the last blog post – Parts of Speech (1) – that parts of speech are the names we use to describe the role played by the different types of words in a language; the job that each word performs in a sentence. After looking at Nouns and Verbs, we [...]
Parts of Speech – Nouns and Verbs
Nouns and Verbs Parts of speech are the names that describe the role or purpose of the different types of words in a language; the job that each word performs in a sentence. First are NOUNS, which are names of things. PROPER NOUNS normally begin with a capital letter (sometimes known as ‘upper case’) and [...]
Grammatically correct writing
Plenty of people will tell you that grammar, spelling and punctuation are unimportant; that the only thing that matters is the fact you communicate. But that’s a contradiction, or at least very close to one. If grammar, spelling and punctuation are incorrect, it makes it very hard for the reader to understand what it is [...]