Leveling-Up Your English Proficiency

How Is Your English So Good? Yes, this is the question that I have people ask me all of the time. When they ask me where I am from, I often tend to break the “surprising” news that I was not born in the United States. This revelation often leads to people commending me on the fact that I hardly sound like a foreigner. That being said, my journey to being seen this way has not been an easy one. Out of all of the troubles that I have had to go through in my life, I have to say that learning English has been one of the toughest challenges that I had to overcome. From learning the specifics of subject-verb agreements to learning about the proper way to use prepositions and conjunctions, my journey to learning this intricate language has not been one of ease. To be frank, it has been a journey of immense frustrations that have manifested through various forms. These have ranged from outbursts to emotional breakdowns. However, the biggest breakdown that I have had in my journey to lea...

One of the biggest mistakes people make while writing is they rely too much on what they know about conversational English. That is to say, they essentially write the same way they speak. It can be confusing at first, but the reality is, spoken and written English are two completely different forms. While spoken English tends to be more relaxed and open to different pronunciations of words, written English can be a bit more strict, especially if we are writing professionally. For example, it might be acceptable for a teacher to verbally address the class as "y'all", but when writing an email to their colleagues, s/he would want to use "you all" instead. The fact of the matter is this: 99.99% of English speakers do not speak and write using the same dialect of English. When writing a paper, email, or whatever else we have more time to think about what words we use, and therefore, are expected to produce a more polished piece. However, we do not have that lu...