Crosby's 9

The three words pit, dump and dive describe bars, restaurants or other establishments that are in bad condition: they’re dirty, dark, shabby, run-down, sleazy… And these words are also used in other expressions that Drew discusses in this episode.

Learning the zero, first, second and third conditionals is a pretty simple exercise. Memorize the structures and plug in the vocabulary: If I eat too much, I get fat; If I eat too much, I’ll get fat; If I ate too much, I’d get fat; If had eaten too much, I would’ve gotten fat. That’s all folks!

In this episode, Drew discusses the differences among the words “dot,” “point” and “period.” “Dot” is used for referring to Internet domains, “point” is for expressing decimals and “period” is a punctuation mark.

Why are you going to give a presentation? This is the first question you need to ask yourself. It aligns your goals and lays out the design and purpose of your speech. From there, the keys to giving a successful speech require adapting it to your audience, developing your message, determining audiovisuals, practicing your delivery and anticipating your audience’s response.

If you care what other people think about how you speak English, it could discourage you from practicing it and, consequently, prevent you from improving. Therefore, when somebody criticizes your English – and even when somebody compliments you on it – it’s best to be indifferent towards what they think. In other words, what other people think about your English is none of your business.

There are two primary factors that have led to the increased occurrence of typos: haste and carelessness. With a spell check feature available in every word processing program, there’s no excuse for having a typo in your written work. (Even so, you should still proofread what you’ve written!). And typos reflect very poorly on you and your organization.

If you’re exhausted from running errands, from running like a chicken with its head cut off or from simply running around, most likely you’re running out of gas or even running on empty. This episode looks at a few expressions that use the word “run.”

A signature is a handwritten example of your name. This podcast looks at how signatures are used (and misused!), explains the difference between the verbs “review” and “revise” and gives advice on pronouncing acronyms.

Our kitchen layout affects the way we cook. Our office layout affects how we work. Since most publishing companies allow you to subscribe to both print and digital versions of their magazines, preference for one format over the other depends a lot on the content’s layout.

You know all the key words in your field, and tons of expressions and slang too. However, there’s one small problem. Your killer vocabulary is rendered useless because you can’t understand the context in English. Fix that by training your ear to recognize your vocabulary when used by native speakers.