common errors in English
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Posted by Michael Rundell on June 26, 2011
A recent post by professional editor Laura Hale Brockway deals with the differences between which and that. This is a tricky problem (especially if English isn’t your first language), and she sets out to explain the ‘rules’ without resorting to linguistic jargon. But some of the advice she gives is contradicted by the evidence of [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on February 03, 2011
Ah…rest, we could all do with a bit more of it and yet it can be such a rare commodity in our busy modern lives. The title of this article lists three words starting with rest…but beware! – one of these words has a quite different meaning. Restful, a lovely word describing something that helps you to chill out. When you reach [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on February 02, 2011
What day do you consider to be the first day of the week? To me, it’s always seemed natural that it’s Monday (because that was the first day of the school week, I suppose), but for some people, it’s Sunday. This seems odd to me, given that Sunday is part of the weekend (note the [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on February 01, 2011
Two words that seem to get commonly mixed up are wary and weary. These two words have very different meanings and so are not interchangeable, but it doesn’t stop people from doing it. Most often, people use weary when they mean wary. Here are some annoying sentences that have insulted my ears recently: I’m quite weary [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on January 28, 2011
How do you start off your emails, and do you always feel comfortable doing it that way? The question of whether to use ‘Dear’, ‘Hi’ or just the person’s name has come up many times, most recently here. It’s certainly a tricky one. ‘Hi’ sounds too informal in many cases, but ‘Dear’ seems overly formal [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on January 26, 2011
Some words seem like they’ve been designed specifically to confuse the learner. Take priceless, for instance. Learners could be forgiven for thinking (as I did as a child) that priceless means ‘having no value’. If you can’t put a price on something, that must surely mean that it isn’t worth anything? But, of course, priceless [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on December 22, 2010
Using set phrases can be a good way for a student to sound more natural and fluent in English, but they can also be something of a double-edged sword. Consider with all due respect – at first glance, it suggests that you are trying to be respectful, whilst expressing a different opinion, but native speakers [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on December 13, 2010
You would think that the tautology would be the province of the foreign language student – after all, we native speakers should probably know our own language well enough to be able to avoid them – but that’s not the case.When you start looking for them, you suddenly realise that we’re surrounded by tautologies, and [...]
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Posted by Beth Penfold on December 02, 2010
I’ve just made up a cool game for myself! Mrs Malaprop was a character in the 1775 play, The Rivals, by Sheridan and her propensity for using incorrect words in her sentences provided much of the play’s humour. Malapropisms, as opposed to the similar but different eggcorns, are where the substituted word almost makes sense but not [...]
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Posted by Sharon Creese on November 30, 2010
Getting students to apply emphasis correctly in their writing can be a tricky one, especially now that we have so many ‘new’ methods of communication – like texting, email and instant messaging – to confuse the issue. Punctuation-wise there’s the exclamation mark, and we can also use inverted commas, as I did with ‘new’, indicating [...]
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