Listen to the author reading this blog post:
by Liz Walter
We often need to keep our minds fixed on the things we are doing, and this post looks at ways of talking about this. Regular readers know that I like to focus on collocations, or words that often go together, and that will certainly be the case for this topic.
I’ll start with a very basic and useful collocation for watching, listening or thinking about something carefully, which is pay attention. Note that when you want to follow it with a noun phrase, you need the preposition to:
I’m going to tell you the route, so please pay attention!
I wish I’d paid more attention to his instructions.
The adjectives close and careful are often used to emphasize the word ‘attention’. We also talk about paying particular attention to one thing or giving something your undivided attention. To talk about how long someone can pay attention, we use the phrase attention span:
Make sure you pay careful attention to your spelling.
Please pay particular attention to section 3 of the document.
I promise to give the matter my undivided attention.
The children have a pretty short attention span.
If you give a lot of attention to something, you concentrate. The preposition you need after this verb is on. We also say that we focus on something or focus our attention on something:
Please be quiet. I’m trying to concentrate.
My attention was focused on the man in the doorway.
If you want to talk about a lack of concentration or focus, some nice verb collocations are lose, waver, wander and lapse, while to describe the opposite – very strong concentration – we often use the adjective intense:
He lost concentration for a moment and took a wrong turn.
I was tired and my concentration began to wander.
There was a look of intense concentration on her face.
We often use the word mind to talk about concentration. For instance, we talk about keeping/fixing your mind on a task or a subject, while when someone loses concentration, we say that their mind wanders/strays:
It was hard to keep my mind on the task in hand.
As I sat by the river, my mind began to stray.
The adverb intently is used with verbs such as stare, listen and concentrate to express the idea of strong concentration. We could also say that someone is attentive:
He listened intently as I told him what had happened.
The audience was very attentive.
Thank you for paying attention to this post and focusing on improving your English!