Improve your English skills: Reaching further

Vocabulary building

• A proverb a day keeps the doctor away!
• Blooming idioms: Flowery language
• Botanical expressions
• Demonyms: Is it Albertines, Albertans or Albertians?
• Environment-related words: A rich eco-vocabulary
• Family relationships
• Food clichés: Appetizing turns of phrase
• Plainly said: Keep it clear!
• Similes: Like taking candy from a baby!
• Synonyms: Replacing the verb “have”

Easily confused words and expressions

• Confusable words: Is it “bad” or “badly”?
• Confusable words: Is it “loath” or “loathe”?
• Similar-sounding words: Are you “discreet” or “discrete”?
• Similar-sounding words: Do you have “flair” or “flare”?
• Similar-sounding words: Do you want “dessert” or “desert”?

Easily confused words and expressions

• Easily confused words and expressions: “adverse,” “adverse to” and “averse to”
• Easily confused words and expressions: “biannual,” “biennial” and “semi-annual”
• Easily confused words and expressions: “comprise,” “compose” and “constitute”
• Easily confused words and expressions: “dependant” and “dependent”
• Easily confused words and expressions: “e.g.” and “i.e.”
• Easily confused words and expressions: “fewer,” “less” and “lesser”
• Easily confused words and expressions: “include” and “comprise”
• Easily confused words and expressions: “regardless,” “irrespective” and “irregardless”
• Easily confused words and expressions: “used to,” “never used to,” “used not to” and “didn’t use to”
• Easily confused words and expressions: “assume” and “presume”
• Easily confused words and expressions: “feel bad” and “feel badly”
• Easily confused words and expressions: “overlook”, “oversee” and “oversight”
• Easily confused words and expressions: “subject to” and “subjected to”

Parts of speech

• Are you adept at adverbs?
• Know your adjectives
• Conjunctions: Coordinating, subordinating or correlative?
• Types of nouns: Name that noun!
• That or which: It’s all relative!
• When to use or omit “that”
• “Whether” or “whether or not”: Do away with “or not”?
• Who or whom: Which one is right?

Prepositions

• Pesky prepositions: Is it one or both?

Plurals

• English plurals: Exceptions to the rules!
• English plurals: Tricky endings
• Plural compounds: Not so straightforward
• Plural compounds: Tricky stuff!

Agreement

• Pronoun agreement: Test your knowledge!
• Subject-verb agreement: Advanced
• Subject-verb agreement: Collective nouns

Sentence structure

• Clauses and phrases: Can you tell the difference?
• Clauses and phrases: Pick the right one!
• Transition words: What’s their function?
• Active and passive voice: Test yourself!

Grammar errors

• Identifying errors: Find the faux pas!
• Identifying errors: Spot the slip-up!
• Commonly misused phrases: Not so easy to spot
• Dangling modifiers: They’ll leave you hanging!
• Dangling modifiers: They’ll leave you in suspense!
• Faulty comparisons: Something’s amiss
• Faulty comparisons: Something’s not right
• Items in a series: Parallelism is paramount!

Parts of speech

• Grammar myths
• Adjectives and adverbs: Tricky errors to watch for
• Noun clauses
• Pronouns: Form is everything
• Three principles of pronoun management
• Relative pronouns: who, whom, whose, which, that
• Correlative conjunctions: both … and
• Correlative conjunctions: either … or
• Correlative conjunctions: neither … nor
• Subordinating conjunctions
• The how-tos of "who" and "whom"
• Blog post: “That” is a tricky one

Plurals

• Plurals: Abbreviations
• Plurals: Apostrophes
• Plurals: Compounds
• Plurals: Foreign nouns

Agreement

• Verb agreement in sentences beginning with “there”
• Verb agreement with collective nouns
• Verb agreement with indefinite pronouns
• Pronoun agreement with collective nouns
• Agreement: The grammar of numbers
• Dubious agreement: Agreement errors
• More dubious agreement: Agreement errors

Sentence structure

• Compound-complex sentences
• Clear communication: An overview of the writing process and related techniques
• Clear communication: Choose positive over negative phrasing
• Identifying and correcting run-on sentences
• Quotations with indirect (reported) speech
• Transition words (connectors)

Grammar errors

• Dangling modifiers
• Excuse me, have you misplaced your modifier?
• The elusive dangling modifier
• Faulty comparisons
• Faulty parallelism

Verbs: General

• Transitive and intransitive verbs: Name that verb!
• Transitive and intransitive verbs: Who did what to whom?

Tenses and moods

• Verb tenses: Timing is everything
• Verb moods: Feeling moody
• Verb moods: Indicative, imperative or subjunctive?
• Conditionals: Choose the correct tense

Verbals

• Verb forms ending in “-ing”
• Verbal remedies: Is that a gerund?
• Verbal remedies: Is that an infinitive?

Verbs: General

• Frequently confused verbs
• Transitive and intransitive verbs

Phrasal verbs

• Phrasal verb: “book off”
• Phrasal verb: “designate as”
• Phrasal verb: “elaborate on”
• Phrasal verbs: “answer for” and “answer to”
• Phrasal verbs: “differ from,” “differ in” and “differ with”
• Phrasal verbs: “embark for,” “embark on” and “embark upon”
• Phrasal verbs: “excuse for” and “excuse from”
• Phrasal verbs: “integrate into” and “integrate with”
• Phrasal verbs: “luck in” and “luck out”
• Phrasal verbs: “preside at” and “preside over”
• Phrasal verbs: “put into effect,” “bring into effect” and “come into effect”

Verbals

• Verbals: An overview
• Gerunds and gerund phrases
• Infinitives and infinitive phrases
• Participles and participle phrases