A couple of days ago I was asked to help write a formal email to someone, we talked about what they wanted to say, and then together changed the language from informal to formal. When the masterpiece was finished, the person I was working with noticed a lot of phrasal verbs they had not seen before. While we often do use phrasal verbs a lot in informal English, there are a set of formal phrasal verbs which can be used in the business arena, both in spoken and written form. I'

Can you say you are fit? Would you be out of breath running to catch the bus? Could you do 100 sit ups / pull ups / press ups ? If you said, a piece of cake , then I envy you, because I'm unfit and I would struggle to even do 5 pull-ups. In fact, if I do any kind of exercise these days, like play football, I know that the next day and sometimes days after my body will be aching and I will feel stiff even if I warm up and warm down before the match. It takes me some time to re

Over the last couple of weeks I have received a handful of phone calls, all of them not for me. How? - I don't know – Why? - I don't know. One phone call was from a company letting me know that my underwear had arrived and is ready for collection. For a split second, I thought, hmmm I could do with some new underwear... but kindly told the woman who called how she had the wrong number. What I also thought was about the language she used and how in English we have many phrasal

After the popularity of the idioms post I posted I thought I'd do another one, but this time on phrasal verbs. Whenever someone asks me what makes someone sound natural, one of the things I say is the use of phrasal verbs. Remember, phrasal verbs are just replacements for other words, but they are more common and that's why they help us sound more natural and really help us when trying to understand what someone is saying. The most annoying thing for students about phrasal ve

I thought I'd write a post looking at words, mainly phrasal verbs, connected with travel and transport and tell you about my journey to Lviv, Ukraine. There will probably be a number of words you might be unsure of, but I have listed them all at the bottom of the text with simplified meanings. Hopefully you should be able to get the meaning from context. Note: The difference between trip and journey is a journey is from A to B and a trip is A to B and back to A. When often sa