200 English Mistakes: Why You Make Them, What to Say Instead, and the One-Line Rule That Fixes Each One for Good

I am agree with you. I have 25 years. I look forward to hear from you. He suggested me to call. I am waiting you. I have worked here since three years. I am boring.

Every one of those is a sentence a real person wrote this week. Every one of them is corrected in this book, in full, with the reason it happens.

Each of the two hundred entries gives you:

• Not this / This — the mistake, and the corrected version beside it, written out as a sentence you can use today

• Why it happens — usually because it is correct in your first language. Spanish, French, Hindi, Polish, Arabic, Chinese and a dozen more are named where they explain the mistake

• The rule — one line, short enough to remember while you are writing

• Two more — further correct examples, so you learn the pattern rather than one sentence

• Nearly the same mistake — the same error in a different shape, so the fix actually sticks

Find it without knowing the grammar word for it. The index at the back lists all two hundred mistakes alphabetically, as sentences. If you remember roughly what you wrote, you can find it in seconds — you do not need to know whether it was a preposition or an article, because that is exactly the thing you would not know.

Start with your own first language. A second index groups the mistakes by where they come from: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Swahili, Yoruba and Greek. For most readers it is the fastest thirty minutes in the book.

And twelve things that are not mistakes at all. Singular they. Starting a sentence with And. Ending one with a preposition. Splitting an infinitive. Different to. People correct all of these with great confidence, and none of them is wrong. That chapter is your answer.

This book does not treat any variety of English as inferior. Where a form is standard in Indian, Nigerian, Singaporean or any other established English, it says so rather than calling it an error.

200 mistakes · 800 correct sentences · 200 one-line rules