This is a conversation between a patient/ attendant and a nurse in a hospital where the patient has been admitted. (In the conversation, the two main characters – nurse and patient/ attendant – have been color-coded for ease of browsing.)…
This post contains a comprehensive list of rules that govern subject-verb agreement. (Note that my comments are enclosed in square brackets ([]) throughout this post.) Here are the 16 rules: Rule 1 Singular subject takes singular verb and plural subject…
All of us read something or the other every day. Can we make use of a small part of that reading to improve our English language skills – mainly written English, but to some extent spoken English as well –…
Non-native speakers mispronounce by the dozen every day. Even fluent speakers do. Even those working in high-paying white-collar jobs do. Why have they been repeating these mistakes for years, even though mastering pronunciation isn’t that difficult? The answer lies in…
Do you fear speaking in English because you worry your friends will make fun of you, what others would say on your mistakes? Do you fear speaking in English in presence of others because yours is not as good as…
An idiom is a phrase or expression whose meaning can’t be deduced directly from individual words in that phrase or expression. In other words, idiom is figurative language. Without further ado, here are 200+ popular idioms, each followed by its…
Not thanking people where you ought to is considered rude. But why some don’t thank? Because some don’t know how to thank. They don’t know what expressions to say. (Covered in point # 2 in this post) Some aren’t sure…
You can’t escape introductions. When you attend a conference, you introduce yourself to new faces you meet. When you attend a social function, you introduce yourself. When you attend an in-house training, you introduce yourself to your colleagues from other…
There are four kinds of skills in any language – reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Reading and listening are passive skills in which you absorb the input (text or voice) passively. Writing and speaking, on the other hand, are active…
You forget some of the points you had prepared the moment you start speaking. You get nervous. You get tongue-tied. (This is called interlocutor effect: how you speak is affected by whom you speak to. Though your ability to speak…
No one has ever escaped death… and also email. Even though emails have become such an integral part of our lives, many of us don’t understand the finer points of writing emails. Remember, you’re relying on emails to accomplish some…
I’ve extensively used online dictionaries, mainly Cambridge English Dictionary and dictionary.com, to improve pronunciation and transfer thousands of words from passive to active vocabulary. I started with dictionary.com. Much later, when I tried Cambridge English Dictionary, I realized that dictionary.com,…
