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There’s a small but brilliant corner of professional English where language and social intelligence overlap. “To pencil something in” lives right there - and it comes with a companion phrase that every professional needs in their arsenal. The pencil and the pen When you pencil something in, you’re scheduling provisionally. The image is simple: pencil can be rubbed out. You’re committing enough to put it in the diary, but both parties understand it isn’t set in stone. It’s a m

Picture the scene. A mum walks into the kitchen. Her five-year-old daughter is standing there, completely still, hands behind her back. There’s chocolate all over her face and hands - but she’s definitely not eating chocolate right now. Mum looks at her daughter and says: "Have you been eating chocolate?" And the little girl - with the guiltiest face you have ever seen - says: “Erm... no.” That, right there, is the present perfect continuous in action. (If you're not yet con

If you’ve ever told a colleague you’re taking a day off, warned someone that the milk’s gone off, and complained that a meeting felt a bit off - all before lunchtime - then you already know that this little word does a lot of work. In English, off is everywhere. It changes meaning depending on context, collocates with dozens of verbs, and has the ability to confuse even advanced learners. So let’s break it down, category by category, and make some sense of it. 1. Movement and

If you’ve been studying English for a while, you’ve almost certainly wrestled with the present perfect simple. You know the form - have/has + past participle - but knowing when to use it, and when to use the past simple instead, is a different matter entirely. Here’s a concept that might change the way you think about it. THE CORE IDEA: ALIVE VS DEAD Think of it this way: the present perfect is alive, and the past simple is dead. When something is still connected to the prese

If you've been learning English for any length of time, you've almost certainly made this mistake. You said "do a mistake" when you meant "make a mistake", or "make your homework" when you meant "do your homework." And if you were talking to a native speaker at the time, you probably noticed the barely perceptible wince - the slight pause before they moved on as if nothing had happened. Don't worry. You're in excellent company. After 25 years of teaching English, I can tell y

There’s a moment in every group class when a teacher has a choice to make. A student says something - not quite right, close but not quite - and the teacher can either let it go and keep the lesson moving, or stop, address it, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. In a class of twenty, you let it go. You have to. There simply isn’t time. In a class of nine, you don’t. That’s the short answer to why I cap my group classes at nine students. But there’s more to it than that, an