Keywords and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) You hear a lot about keywords and search engine optimisation (SEO), but how much of it is just gobbledygook? If Google and the other search engines told the world how they decide on which link appears at what position in their search results, everyone would follow the same approach [...]
The basics of style
English is more than one language. Apart from U.K. (Queen’s) English, there’s obviously U.S. English. But where did it all start? Because the UK has been invaded countless times over the centuries, its language is an amalgam of many tongues. The Roman occupation some 2,000 years ago lasted 400 years, so much of our vocabulary [...]
Verbs and their tenses
Remember Latin? Verbs of the first, second, third and fourth conjugations? All very structured; all very logical. Well English isn’t like that. You just have verbs … period. Doing words like I ‘eat‘ or I ‘drive‘ a car and so on. Now clearly you can drive a car yesterday, today or tomorrow. You may still [...]
Verbs, subjects and objects
Every sentence must have a verb. If there is no verb then it is not a grammatically correct sentence. I mentioned in an earlier post (Nouns and verbs) that verbs are ‘doing’ words. There are two types of ‘doing’ and thus two types of verb. Let me illustrate with examples. If I say I am [...]
Pedantry and Prepositions
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 [...]