Listen to the author reading this blog post.
Today’s post looks at phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs relating to studying, learning, and taking exams.
Let’s start with some useful verbs for reading.
If you read through or read over something, you read it carefully from start to finish, often to find errors or check your understanding:
When I’ve finished the essay, I’ll read it through.
I need to read over the last couple of pages.
Go over has two meanings that are relevant to this post. You can go over an essay or other piece of work by examining it carefully, often to look out for errors. You can also go over an essay or some notes by studying them again, often before a test:
Always go over your essay and check for grammatical errors.
The morning before the exam, I went over all of my notes.
Meanwhile, if you skim through or skim over a long piece of text, you read it all quickly and not carefully, often just to understand the main points or to find a particular piece of information:
I’ve just skimmed through the first chapter – I’ll read it properly later.
I only skimmed over the article and read the relevant bits.
Finally, for ‘reading’ verbs, to pore over a book or document is to read it carefully and with great concentration:
She’s spent every evening this week poring over her textbooks.
Moving on to the process of learning itself, if you brush up on a skill or knowledge that you had in the past, you make an effort to remember or improve it:
I need to brush up on my Portuguese before going to Brazil.
Meanwhile, if you pick up a new skill or language, you learn it by observing or listening to other people rather than formally studying:
You’ll soon pick up the language once you’re living there.
I picked up lots of cooking tips from my grandma.
Let’s look now at two exam phrasal verbs. If a subject that you have studied comes up in an exam, you are asked a question or questions about it:
I spent ages studying the structure of the heart, and it didn’t even come up!
If you scrape through an exam, you manage to pass it, but only by a few points:
He scraped through his final exams despite doing very little course work.
I’ll finish with a useful ‘write’ phrasal verb. If you write up a report or essay, etc., you write the full and final form of it, using notes that you have made:
I’ve done a basic plan for the essay, now I just need to write it up.
I hope you found this post useful. Perhaps you’d like to tell me below about a skill or a language that you picked up?
Great!
Thank you!
Loved the article.
That’s great to hear – thank you!
Great!
Thanking you for the article. Is it correct here to say thank you for writing up this article?
You’re welcome – and thanks for the query! Actually, it sounds a little odd. You write up the full form of something that you’ve previously made notes or a plan for. So you’d be more likely to use ‘write up’ in the following sort of sentence: ‘I’ll write up my notes from the meeting and circulate them.’ I hope that answers your question.
Thank you so much!
Hi i am student my name is Rijuwan Ahmed
Thank you! Very useful
I’m delighted to hear it – thank you!
Good Evening, Kate. I’m writing from California. You asked about new skills. I am joining the Guild of Book Workers to learn the skill of paper marbling.
I love paper marbling! What a wonderful skill to acquire!
Brazil mentioned.
My Danish friends in Brussels were astonished when they realized their children had picked up English from watching television.
A great example! (I hope it’s true?)
Great post as usual! Thank you very much.
At the same time, I can’t help noticing the phrase ‘You can go over an essay or other piece of work by examining it carefully’ that you’ve written in the article. However, elsewhere in the article, you’ve said ‘a long piece of text’ and ‘a particular piece of information’. Moreover, the rule says that we use ‘another’ (not ‘other’) with singular nouns, and we write ‘another’ as one word.
If I’m not mistaken, the word ‘piece’ in the phrase ‘piece of work’ plays a role of a singular countable noun. Therefore, taking into account the rule (‘another’ must be written as one word), that phrase of yours should be ‘You can go over an essay or another piece of work by examining it carefully’ as the correct way of saying is ‘another piece of work’ rather than ‘other piece of work’, isn’t it?
I usually manage to produce well-written pieces, but writing is a skill that requires regular practice; it’s not something you can easily pick up after a long break. After periods without writing, the challenge of writing up an essay or report—both of which have specific structure and formal tone—becomes real. If you don’t want to scrape through the task, it’s essential to read over your work carefully, which is definitely advisable.
Great examples of these phrasal verbs in use! Thanks so much for sharing.
Thanks for your nice comment, Denis – always appreciated! Thanks too for the query. Actually, ‘another’ and ‘other’ are both fine in this sentence though I can see why you’ve queried it (and perhaps ‘another’ would have sounded better). Best wishes from Cambridge.