Every weekday morning, I get an email from Delancey Place.  It’s a non-profit organisation that sends short excerpts from non-fiction books and if you buy the book through the link they provide to Amazon, they make a donation to children’s literacy programmes.  For me, it’s a short piece of good writing I can enjoy when I have a 5 minute break in my day.  For you, it could be a nice way to have a broad choice of things to read...

It’s difficult to become a good writer without spending a lot of time reading good writing.  And I think we all know the quality of most of the writing on Facebook and Instagram.  So where do you find good writing that’s not 350 pages long? One place where you can read (and listen to!) short essays about hundreds of different topics is at This I Believe.  The website is a revived version of a radio programme in the 1950s where...

The obligation to write in the correct style does not only apply to examinations.  The author of this article is struggling with the rigid constraints of academic style.  I am having the same struggle as I complete my master’s degree.  It’s very strange having to write about what I think without being allowed to use the word “I”! But unfortunately, this is just the way things are.  This is the style and fighting against...

You have probably read a lot about what you need to do to get a good score on the IELTS speaking test.  Unfortunately, a lot of this information is hard to understand.  But the British Council has recently published a series of videos that I think really explains these requirements well.  In the IELTS speaking test, you will be given scores in 4 areas: Fluency & Coherence Lexical Range Grammatical Accuracy Pronunciation To understand...

Email Writer is a new app for iPhone, iPad and Android which will allow you to select from thousands of sentence combinations so you can write your business emails quickly and easily.  Sometimes you don’t want to look for the right preposition or expression when you’re in a hurry and this app will be a huge help in those situations.  Watch the video to see how it works! The maker of the app also runs The Business English Blog with...