- Common Mistakes
Discuss About? 10 Verbs That Do Not Want the Word You Are About to Add
Discuss about. Enter into the room. Contact with me. These feel right because a preposition is what your own language would put there. English does not, and the extra word is one of the most visible non-native signals in a whole essay.
- Grammar Lessons
Hard or Hardly? 8 Words That Flip Meaning When You Add -ly
You were taught that -ly turns an adjective into an adverb. Usually true. For a small group of very common words it does something else entirely: it changes the meaning, sometimes to the opposite. He works hard and he hardly works are not the same sentence.
- Vocabulary
Say or Tell? Borrow or Lend? 10 Verb Pairs That Are Not the Same
Some verbs sit so close together that most learners treat them as one word with two spellings. They are not. Each one points at a different person, a different direction, or a different amount of effort, and picking the wrong one is instantly audible.
- Grammar Lessons
I Am Boring: The One Letter Pair That Says the Opposite of What You Mean
Bored or boring? Interested or interesting? Two endings, one letter apart, and picking the wrong one does not make your sentence odd. It makes it mean the opposite. Here is the two-second rule that fixes all of them at once.
- Grammar Lessons
Informations, Advices, Peoples: The Nouns That Refuse to Take an S
Information, advice, research, furniture, knowledge. In most languages these words have a plural. In English they simply refuse. Here is the short list that covers almost every mistake, plus the trick for counting them when you need to.
- Vocabulary
Affect or Effect? 10 Word Pairs That Trip Up Every IELTS Student
Some pairs of English words look almost the same and mean different things. You can be at a high level and still mix them up, because nothing feels wrong when you write them. Here are the ten that show up most often in IELTS essays.
- Grammar Lessons
Comma Splice in IELTS Writing: What It Is and How to Fix It
Traffic is bad, many people arrive late. That sentence looks harmless and it is a grammar error. It is also one of the most repeated errors in IELTS writing, and there are four ways to fix it in under a second.
- Grammar Lessons
A, An, The: The Three Smallest Words That Cost the Most IELTS Marks
Articles are three tiny words, and they are the most repeated error in IELTS writing. The good news is that most mistakes come from only three situations. Learn those and your accuracy jumps without learning a single new tense.
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