Lopdo wrote:Not sure if it will do any good, but here is the idea. I write a lot in English, both here and
in other places, but my English is far from perfect (as you can see).
At this stage, courses seem rather ineffective, so I thought that maybe some correcting would help. I would like to ask native English speakers (only those proficient enough of course, anyone who writes their instead of there is disqualified
) to point out and fix mistakes I write all over this forum. All of it should take place in this topic
, so that we don't pollute rest of the forum. Simple correction of mistake
s {talking about more than one mistake} should be enough, but
a little
{"bit of" - unnecessary filler words} explanation and/or examples would be nice
So if there is someone who thinks he can help and is sufficiently bored, here I am, waiting to be shamed and hoping to learn something
Also, please no off-topic posts of any kind, relevant discussion is welcome, but this topic will be heavily moderated
Your English is way better than many so-called native speakers, and I needed to pretend I was a grammar Nazi to find them all. Most errors are basically irrelevant errors, or have more to do with the imperfections of English than your grammar.
Speaking your sentences aloud will help with minor things such as commas.
Let's say we have a sentence:
I would never do that to him.
In Slovak, we can use little change in wording and word used to put focus either "that" or him" (meaning either that I would do something else without problem (focus on "that"), or that I would do same thing to someone else without problem but not him (focus on "him")). I was thinking about English equivalent of such changes and I thought I had it, but I can't remember it anymore. My original question was if the changes made same distinctions, but now I have to ask, is there some subtle change I can do to that sentence to put more weight on one word or the other?
English is more about word order than stressing. If you're writing informally, then you could get away with underlining the word
that to stress it, but it's the only way in your example.
Of course, one sentence doesn't live on its own, and sentences prior to this sentence influences the meaning and objectification of the current sentence. In your example, if the two people were talking primarily about actions, then the object word 'that' would naturally be more important. But if the two people were focused on the guy prior to the sentence, then the sentence would be naturally focused on the word 'him'.
