2017 Blog Round Up
Happy New Year!
Whether you are a regular user of our English spelling website or someone who’s just signed up, we hope 2018 will be a great year for improving your spelling. Here are some of our favourite blog posts from 2017:
- We began the year by coming up with seventeen spelling and grammar goals for 2017 – how many did you achieve?
- As usual we looked at pairs and groups of confusing words and shared tips and tricks to help you tell them apart. This year we looked at: alternate vs. alternative, bated vs. baited, bough vs. bow, complacent vs. complaisant, conscious vs. conscience, curb vs. kerb, e.g. vs. i.e., elicit vs. illicit, everyday vs. every day, flare vs. flair, flaunt vs. flout, hear vs. here, poll vs. pole, son vs. sun, wait vs. weight, and who vs. whom.
- As a resource for our students who are learning English, we continued looking at the definitions of popular idioms in the English language. In 2017, we looked at idioms about love, idioms about mothers and parenting, idioms about eggs, idioms about science and technology, idioms about dancing, idioms about cats, idioms about friendship, idioms about death, and idioms about winter.
- We finished the series we started back in 2016 by looking at Four Ways to Spell the Long U Sound.
- To help our students feel confident with their grammar and punctuation, we looked at how to use commas as part of a list, how to use commas in direct speech, how to format speech, word classes (part one and part two), pronouns, subject and object, how to use commas to separate clauses, how to use hyphens in compound words, further tips for using hyphens, common apostrophe errors, and confusing verb tenses. We also shared a post recapping our favourite grammar and punctuation articles from over the years.
- We offered advice on how to improve your writing by avoiding redundant expressions and shared ten redundant expressions to stop using. We looked at words that people often pronounce incorrectly. We shared tips for handling confusing homophones.
- While exploring interesting aspects of the English language, we looked at Janus words, the origins of three eggy idioms, and these famous Christmas characters. We also looked at the significance of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
What did you enjoy most on our blog in 2017, and what would you like to see more of? Which articles have you found the most useful? Let us know so that we can make 2018’s articles as useful as possible. You can contact us via Facebook, Twitter and email, or by leaving a comment below. We’d also love to hear what your 2018 spelling resolutions are.
Once again, from all the team at Spellzone, we hope you have a very happy new year!
03 Jan 2018
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