American vs British English

Lesson #162: All About Hyphens and Dashes (in UK and US English)

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​Nearly everyone knows about – even if they have not read – Jane Austen’s famous novels: Pride and Prejudice (1813), Sense and Sensibility (1811), Persuasion (1818), and Emma (1815), not to mention Mansfield Park (1814)and Northanger Abbey (1817). 📚 But most people, including native English speakers, are less familiar with Austen’s earlier (or unpublished) writings. Works like The […]

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Lesson #141 (Part 2): American Vs British Punctuation: How To Use British English Quotation Marks

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📘 ‘Why do you say “poor Rosamond”?’ said Mrs Plymdale, a round-eyed sharp little woman, like a tame falcon. – George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871) As observed in our last lesson post (Part 1 of this lesson, ‘American vs British Quotation Mark Punctuation’), there are 4 main rules on how to punctuate quotations in English. Today we will

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Lesson #141 (Part 1): American Vs British Punctuation: How To Use American English Quotation Marks

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📙 “… my mother has not gone into details. She chiefly communicates with us by means of telegrams, and her telegrams are rather inscrutable. They say women don’t know how to write them, but my mother has thoroughly mastered the art of condensation. ‘Tired America, hot weather awful, return England with niece, first steamer decent

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Lesson #124: Some Ways British English Expressions Can Differ From American Expressions

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Over the last few days I have been listening to several podcasts and YouTube videos while doing housework.  Almost all of these are hosted by English speakers from the U.S.A., and I noticed how many expressions are used in conversational American English that aren’t typically employed in the U.K. or Ireland. Many English language learners

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