GCSE English doesn’t help
You’ve got a GCSE in English, you use English every day, so why are you struggling so much with writing your website content?
Five reasons to use the passive voice
Six positives if you count annoying any English teacher who’s told you to only write in the active voice. Writing […]
Breaking the passive habit
There are five good reasons for using the passive, aside from those, using the active is by far the more preferable […]
20 sentence patterns you can’t ignore
I’ve been working and researching sentences almost daily, now, for over a year. Yes I’m a word-nerd, but there you […]
Extraposition and inversion: glam-sounding simple things
Sentence patterns are very predictable in English, and, whether you’re a native-speaker or not, it’s easy to get into a […]
How to move from one sentence to the next, naturally
The key to moving naturally from one sentence to the next — which is, of course, the whole point of […]
There, there: a no-brainer for emphasis in a sentence
This approach to adding emphasis or drawing attention to one part of a sentence is rather grandly called ‘existential there’ […]
Make words work
Placing emphasis on the right idea and right word in a sentence is an art. In the UK this isn’t […]
How tiny words can change your writing
One tiny little word can make such a difference to the meaning, the deeper meaning, of a sentence. Take a […]
All power to ‘to be’: cleft sentences
Writing teachers can be super mean about ‘to be’. It’s a boring, unemotive, indescriptive verb, a total waste of space, […]