Adjectives are important words in language because an adjective is a word that describes or modifies a noun, providing more detail about it. A noun is a word that represents a person, place, thing, or idea such as a dog,…
Reflexive verbs are those where the action reflects back on the subject, using reflexive pronouns such as myself or yourself. Ergative verbs are those that exhibit a unique flexibility in allowing the subject of an intransitive sentence to be the…
Nowadays, the third-person pronoun one is seldom used, except by the upper classes and in certain academic writing because of its formal tone. However, it has a unique role as a pronoun that allows it to be used in a…
There are three main types of conjunctions: coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions and correlative conjunctions. Conjunctions are a part of speech or word class often described as ‘joining words’, because many conjunctions, such as ‘but’ and ‘and’, join words or clauses…
This post will explain in simple steps what an academic essay is and how to write one. This is a skill that is required not only for students of higher and further education, but also for students of English who…
Nouns, also known as naming words, are essentially the building blocks of a language. They are the words that we give things, the names of the objects, animals, people, places and concepts that enable us to express our reality in…
The full stop is the small dot that appears at the end of a sentence written in certain scripts such as the Roman alphabet, which is used for the majority of Western languages. Likenesses of a full stop, also called…
Many people can comfortably go through life without ever knowing the difference between a hyphen, a dash, and whether that dash is an ‘en’ dash or an ’em’ dash. If you are reading this article, you are not one of…
Subject-verb agreement is a fundamental grammatical concept that refers to the proper matching of the subject of a sentence with the appropriate verb form. This post is a comprehensive and clear guide to subject-verb agreement. A singular subject should take…
Colons and semicolons are punctuation marks that serve distinct purposes in writing. The use of a variety of characters is necessary when writing with the Roman alphabet because it enables a reader to see what words are associated with what…