by Phil Williams | Sep 2, 2025 | Books, Grammar
As promised in my most recent blog post, over the next four months I’m going to give away each of my books on this website, starting with Word Order in English Sentences. If you missed that post, I thought it time to put out the books a bit more freely, given that the...
by Phil Williams | May 13, 2025 | Grammar, Vocabulary, Words, Writing skills
If you want to say something with fewer words in English, it’s often possible to choose more specific vocabulary. When it comes to choosing your verbs, this can impact entire phrases. Today, I’m looking at a common issue in my fiction editing work, where we have verbs...
by Phil Williams | Feb 18, 2025 | Grammar, Writing skills
I often discuss breaking down sentence structure and word order to demonstrate how understanding sentence components helps provide flexibility with structure. You can use the full word order guide to help with this here. Today, though, I’d like to discuss cases when...
by Phil Williams | Jan 16, 2025 | Grammar, Writing skills
Effective pronoun and determiner use in English can be tricky and very nuanced. I’ve already got a few articles on their uses here, where I’ve said it’s hard to learn from the rules alone. The issue I want to discuss here is when general plurals are used instead of...
by Phil Williams | Oct 8, 2024 | Exercises, General English, Grammar, Vocabulary
It’s October, which means it’s time for another Halloween-themed article! This year, I’ve gone with a tenses/reading exercise again; you can enjoy this just for the reading practice, to see some Halloween English in use, or you can test yourself on the most...
by Phil Williams | Dec 12, 2023 | Exercises, Grammar, Vocabulary
It’s that time of year again: Festive Season, meaning festive articles on ELB! Adding to my collection of seasonal Christmas articles which you can find here, today I’ve got another mixed tenses exercise. As we did in October for Halloween, this exercise tests...