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The words “ We Forget” are spoken on Remembrance Day, commemorating the end of the First World War when the armistice brought hostilities to an end “at the 11th hour…
in the past, in those days
The various past tenses in English permit temporal ordering and indications of having or not having finished. An adverbial indicating a temporal duration in or into the past acts as…
at present, these days
Often the use of the simple present tense suffices to indicate that an assertion is being made about the present state of affairs, including the “factual present” sense used when…
in (the) future
In the future is used at the beginning or end of a sentence and means from some point in the future onward: There will be peace on earth in the…
Effects, etc.
Some sentences from the BAWE Corpus (via Web Concordance English) to help prise apart the meanings of the related nouns effect, result, influence, impact, consequence, repercussion, outcome, fallout, aftermath, upshot,…
Folding, flattening, weaving
The convoluted paths of etymology lead us from many English words* to the Latin verb plicare – to fold or weave. Here we look at three examples common in academic…
The Paramedic Method
Richard Lanham in Revising Prose (UCLA, 1981) proposes the following method for snipping a sentence into shape: Reassemble the pieces, and resuscitate. See Lanham’s first example, “There is a good…
Phrasal verbs in academic writing
Phrasal verbs in English fall into three classes: a main verb and an adverb particle (‘bring in’), a verb and a preposition which cannot be separated from each other (‘cope…
Unpacking Enthymemes: The Persuasive Power of Missing Pieces
Have you ever found yourself convinced by an argument that left out a crucial piece of information? That missing piece might just be an enthymeme – a powerful rhetorical device…
Top 10 Online Fallacies
How to Spot Them and How to Avoid Them in Your Own Writing In today’s digital age, it’s more important than ever to be able to spot fallacies online. Fallacies…