Category: English

What’s a formal email? Formal emails are typically sent to people you don’t know very well, business contacts or authority figures. This might be an HR recruiter, a prospective client or a public official. If you’re not sure whether to send a formal or an informal email, it’s probably best...

We are all negotiators, whether we know it or not. Asking for a raise, selecting a restaurant for lunch or bargaining with your child are several examples of negotiation we engage in regularly. However, while negotiations are daily practice, the appropriate language used for effective bargaining doesn’t come easily for...

Prepositions can be a recurring nightmare for English language learners; there are about 150 prepositions in the English language and they are more often used than other individual words.

Arranging words in the right order If you think you know everything there is to know about the English language – think again! This article will introduce a binding rule of English syntax (i.e. the arrangement of words and phrases in a sentence)

Making and taking telephone calls in your second language can be a daunting task, especially when a call catches you by surprise. We’ve all been there; stammering, searching for words, awkward silences, and even opting to write an email just to avoid all of the above.

Mastering the art of presenting takes time and practice. Nobody is born with natural presentation skills and even the best orators, such as Cicero, Martin Luther King, Steve Jobs, and Barack Obama, had many years of practice before they became excellent public speakers.

Idioms are phrases used as a form of expression which appear natural to a language, person or group of people. They are not easily explained using grammar rules and cannot be easily understood by defining the individual words (e.g. when we say it’s raining cats and dogs, there will be...

English has many genuinely confusing words in its vocabulary, but the words discussed in this post are unfortunately not part of them. The difference between these commonly confused words is relatively straightforward, yet they are commonly mixed up with one another, especially online. When do we use your instead of...

The British and the Americans clearly speak the same language, even though there is enough variation to create different versions of the language with slightly different characteristics. Are the British and the Americans really ‘divided by a common language’? How different are these two, really? N.B.: For the record, the...

If you’ve ever negotiated your way out of a tricky situation or took part in a business transaction, you’ve probably employed a certain level of tact as a means of achieving your objective.