2025-03-13 Common Adverbs in Conversation: Amplifiers, Downtoners
From VOA Learning English, this is Everyday Grammar. Imagine you are at a business meeting. You have just presented a plan to your business partners. They want to give suggestions…
2025-03-06 Adverb and Adjective Choices in Conversation
From VOA Learning English, this is Everyday Grammar. Imagine two American students are talking outside of their school. Let’s listen to the imaginary conversation: A: Today is going slow. B:…
2025-02-27 Reviewing Your Birthday Message
Recently, our readers and listeners wrote many lovely messages about their birthdays. We have been reading all of them. Most messages are happy. You wrote about gifts you received, the…
2025-02-20 Describing Your Birthday
Today, on Everyday Grammar, we will learn to describe our birthdays. When is your birthday? When people ask us the question “When is your birthday?” we can answer a few…
2025-02-13 Academic Writing: Common Sentence Patterns, Part Four
English has many patterns. Learning and mastering these patterns can help you improve your writing and speaking skills. They can also help you do better on your next grammar test!…
2025-02-06 Academic Writing: Common Sentence Patterns, Part Three
From VOA Learning English, this is Everyday Grammar. English has many patterns. Basic grammatical patterns can explain the structure of around 95 percent of sentences in English, says Martha Kolln,…
2025-01-30 Academic Writing: Common Patterns, Part Two
The Everyday Grammar team often receives questions about academic writing. Students around the world want to improve their academic writing so that they can gain admission – and succeed –…
2025-01-23 Academic Writing: Common Patterns, Part One
The new school year is beginning in communities across the United States. Many students are busy at work in their new classes. Some are already thinking about all the homework…
2025-01-16 Studying Sentence Patterns to Improve Your Writing, Part Two
From VOA Learning English, this is Everyday Grammar. In a previous Everyday Grammar story, we discussed two common sentence patterns using the word “be.” This week, we are going to…
2025-01-09 Studying Sentence Patterns to Improve Your Writing, Part One
Many English learners have spent a lot of time studying the parts of speech: adjectives, nouns and verbs, for example. But sometimes studying the English sentence from a larger perspective…
2025-01-02 Questions, Answers about Holiday Activities
Imagine you are talking to an American. You are curious to know about what they did during the holidays of Christmas and New Year’s. How can you ask about these…
2024-12-26 Grammar for Making New Year’s Resolutions
The New Year can come on different dates for different cultures. Most of the Western world, for example, celebrates it on January 1st. But one thing many cultures have in…
2024-12-19 Grammar and Christmas
Many Americans experience surprise (or disappointment) when they wake up on Christmas Day. They might be surprised or disappointed by a family member’s actions. They might be happy or unhappy…
2024-12-12 Fun with Future Tenses
For VOA Learning English, this is Everyday Grammar. This week, we are going to talk about the future tenses. There are several ways to talk about future events in English.…
2024-12-05 Simple Past and Present Perfect
Editors note: This is the third of a four-part series on verb tenses. Click here to see part one. See the others in Related Stories. In this week’s episode of…