Archive for 'English Grammar'
Using ‘too’, ‘also’ and ‘as well’ Posted by carol on Feb 28, 2019
Good evening to all! The year is going by too fast, don’t you think so? Me too! The three terms too, also and as well in English are very similar, since they all express the idea of addition. But there are some nuances and differences that need to be taken into consideration when adopting each one…
English Punctuation Failures Posted by Gary Locke on Feb 4, 2019
We really don’t devote as much space in this blog to the little things. And by little things I mean periods, commas, quotation marks, question marks, and exclamation marks. Yet, we use those little dashes, dots, and curlicues every day. I didn’t even mention the ellipsis marks, parenthesis, colons, and semi-colons (there’s a reason for…
English Malapropisms & Mixed Metaphors Posted by Gary Locke on Jan 24, 2019
Mistakes happen. Like the blue-footed booby bird, goofy things turn up once in a while. It can’t be helped. When you are learning a language, and especially if you think you know common idioms and expressions, you just might say something that isn’t quite right. Hey, even if you’re a native speaker it can happen!…
English Superlatives Posted by Gary Locke on Jan 3, 2019
Pictured: The Grand Canyon. But, really, it’s the grandest canyon, don’t you think? In English, if you want to describe something, you use an adjective. There essentially are three types of adjectives – simple, comparative, and superlative. The most basic examples would be big, bigger, biggest. I ate a big sandwich, my sister ate a…
Phrasal verbs for phone calls Posted by carol on Nov 30, 2018
Hello! Who am I speaking to? Last month, we covered here on the blog some words related to using your phone in English. Today, we are moving one step further to take a look at some phrasal verbs that refer to phone calls. Although it is undeniable that text messaging has become one of the…
When English Offers Choices Posted by Gary Locke on Nov 29, 2018
This past week I witnessed a customer at a store point to something and say, “I’ll have two of those.” Before placing the items in a bag and finalizing the sale, the clerk said, “These ones?” That response by the clerk was a redundancy, the use of an extra word which wasn’t needed. Because the…
Basic English: Positively Negative Posted by Gary Locke on Oct 11, 2018
Some of the most common words in English are negatives. These words express the opposite of a positive statement. There are a lot of them. However, this is English after all, so not all negatives fit into the same grammatical category. Let’s take a little time to clarify which part of speech these negatives belong…