English Resources

Mastery of grammar involves knowing the rules of correct speech and using them properly. Beyond that lies Rhetoric, the art of eloquent and persuasive speech. One useful source that offers a glimpse into the richness of rhetorical practice is Silva Rhetoricae. There you'll find a name and a careful description for virtually every form and mode of expression imaginable.

Are you completely disinterested or uninterested in your statistics course? Did your boss appraise or apprise you of the latest quarterly results of your team? For many, these pairs are a neverending source of perplexity, and for this reason, they have come to be known as the "Notorius Confusables." You'll find some useful discussion and some helpful review quizzes on these bedeviling doublets of English here and here.

If you are looking for a particular topic or aspect of English grammar, chances are you'll find it somewhere on this list of links. Click and you are taken to a discussion of the particular grammar question. Many of the discussions include quizzes that you can take and then check the answers online. For example, what's a "squinting modifier?" Find out here.

There are many ways to organize an essay into a clear, coherent, unified piece of writing. It partly depends on your topic, in particular on your thesis, which is what it is that you specifically want to say about your topic.

This page offers an overview of some of the main ways to organize an essay. Please have a look!

You can find a lot of information about sentence structure here. This is a summary of sentence types, but the entire section is worth reading:

We can categorize sentences into four main types, depending on the number and type of clauses they contain:


Simple (one independent clause):

We drove from Connecticut to Tennessee in one day.

Compound (more than one independent clause):

We were exhausted, but we arrived in time for my father's birthday party.

Complex (one independent clause and at least one dependent clause):

Although he is now 79 years old, he still claims to be 65.

Compound-complex (more than one independent clause and at least one dependent clause):

After it was all over, my dad claimed he knew we were planning something, but we think he was really surprised.

Pronounciation is not just a problem for those coming to English from another language. As this list of the 100 most commonly mispronounced words in English shows, native speakers have difficulty with many of our most common words and idioms.

Here is some useful information about Agreement between subjects and verbs.

Spanish sentences tend to be longer and looser than American English sentences. Where several thoughts might be connected by commas in Spanish, this often leads to ''run on'' sentences in English. If you're having occasional difficulty with run-on sentences, or simply with to review the basic idea, have a look at this useful discussion.