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by Liz Walter
Today’s post looks at phrases for talking about what the future holds. In particular, it will cover vocabulary relating to how much – if at all – we can control what happens to us.
Continue reading “It’s written in the stars: talking about things that might happen in the future”
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Today’s post has a very positive feel to it as I’m looking at the language around responding to opportunities.
Starting with a useful collocation, we say that we take an opportunity, meaning that we use a chance to do something.
Continue reading “Making the most of it (How we talk about using opportunities)”
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by Liz Walter
Today’s post covers vocabulary, and particularly natural-sounding collocations (words that often go together), for talking about things we want to do in our lives.
Continue reading “Pursuing aims and meeting targets: talking about things we want to achieve”
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by Liz Walter
Today’s post is the first in a short series on the topic of crime and it looks at some general vocabulary. Once again, I will be focusing on collocations, or words that go together. Continue reading “Committing, tackling, and solving: talking about crime”
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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. Continue reading “Paying attention and listening intently: talking about concentration”
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It’s said that the artist Andy Warhol once predicted that in the future, everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes. We can’t say for certain what he meant by this. Perhaps he was reflecting on the desire that so many people have to be famous. Given this desire and the great level of interest in the lives of famous people, it is not surprising that there is a lot of vocabulary in this area. Continue reading “World-famous and newfound fame (Collocations of ‘famous’ and ‘fame’)”
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by Liz Walter
For most of us, stress is unfortunately a part of modern life. Today’s post is about words and phrases we use to talk about the experience of stress and our attempts to reduce it. Continue reading “Everything’s getting on top of me: talking about stress”
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This week, we’re looking at alternatives to the word advice, including single word near-synonyms and phrases. We’ll start by considering the noun ‘advice’ itself because it has some nice collocations. You give advice and you get advice. If you do what someone advises you to do, you take or follow their advice: Continue reading “Hints, hacks and pointers (Words meaning ‘advice’)”
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by Liz Walter
One way to improve your English is to find more interesting vocabulary to use instead of very common words. This post looks at five verbs you can use instead of ‘get’. Regular readers of my posts will know that I often talk about collocation, or words that commonly go together. I’ll be focusing on this particularly today because although the words I’m covering are basically synonyms, some of them tend to collocate strongly with particular groups of nouns. Note that they are all a little more formal than ‘get’ but still commonly used, especially in writing. Continue reading “Obtaining information and deriving satisfaction: 5 different ways of saying ‘get’”
by Liz Walter
One of our readers recently asked for a post on collocations relating to the world of work. Well, she’s lucky because she’s getting two of them! This first one focuses on starting and leaving jobs.
Continue reading “Applying for a job or handing in your notice: collocations for work (1)”