The third instalment of ideas to take your English to the next level. These notes can of course be of interest to foreign learners too.
Some nice constructions
I’ll pick on a couple of interesting constructions for today.
Our first one is the rather interesting technique of “double negatives” – making a statement by denying the opposite. The rhetorical effect is to sound less assertive, diplomatically acknowledging something without overstating it:
- It hasn’t gone unnoticed (rather than “it has been noticed”)
- It’s not without interest (rather than “it is interesting”)
- They would not be displeased to see the findings disseminated
- There is no great number of…
- There’s no shortage of…
- The less than pleasant aspects of his character
- He’s not the quickest
Our second construction is the following type of statement:
- A building, under which was a garage
- A shop, next to which was a large sign
- A hill, at the top of which stood an old oak tree
- We came across a fountain, around which children were playing
The structure is easy to understand – we make a first statement, followed by a spacial prepositional phrase like “under” or “next to” plus “which”, and then followed by a further relative clause giving more information. This construction is elegant since it’s economical and flow well, and avoids the clumsiness of two separate sentences (“There was a building. A garage was under the building”). Of course you can rephrase more casually if you like – “A building with a garage beneath it”.
Substitutions
It can be handy to have alternatives to common words. Here are a few to get us going:
I’ll leave it there for now, but we could come up with hundreds of nice examples – a good subject for future posts!
Key words
Let’s finish today’s post with a few words which go along way.
“quite”
A simple but powerful word to convey that something’s rather special:
- He’s quite a pianist!
Replacing “a” with “the” can change the nuance – stressing the point even more (though I think this formulation can verge on the sarcastic!):
- He’s quite the pianist!
- It’s quite the feast!
“consequence”
Another versatile word (which sounds nicer than “result”) that shouldn’t be overlooked:
- In consequence, … (or consequently)
- the consequence being that…
- And the consequence of this was…
“business” (or “matter”, “question”)
We often need to reach out for a general term to refer to the issue in hand. “Business” does the job well, as in:
- I would contest this business about…
- I think the whole business of writing is so difficult that…
The above points might all seem obvious, dear reader, but it’s sometimes necessary to really spell them out in order to be able to actively put them into practice.