Guides
Write English that sounds native
Practical guides to the English that grammar checkers miss: the habits your first language brings with it, and the tone that fits each message at work.
If you use English at work every day, you probably don’t make many grammar mistakes anymore. What’s left is harder to see: a preposition that’s correct in your own language, a phrase translated word for word, an email that sounds more formal than you meant. Native readers understand you perfectly. They just notice that something is slightly off.
These guides collect the mistakes that come up most for speakers of specific languages and explain the pattern behind each one, so you can spot it in your own writing. Every example shows the original sentence and the fix, marked up the way an editor would.
- English mistakes Russian speakers makeArticles, “until” vs “by”, “How do you think?” and the other habits Russian grammar brings into English.
- English mistakes Spanish speakers make“I have 30 years”, “people is”, false friends like “actually” and “assist”, and the Spanish behind them.
- English mistakes German speakers make“Did you become my email?”, “since three years”, “eventually” and other words that look right but aren’t.
- Casual vs formal EnglishThe same message written both ways, what “too formal” looks like, and how Slack differs from email.
How to use them
Pick the guide for your first language and skim the examples. You’ll probably recognize a few of your own habits within minutes, and each one comes with the reason it happens, which makes it much easier to catch next time. The guide to casual and formal English applies to everyone, whatever language you grew up with.
If you’d rather have the fixes made for you, AI Grammatic does this in any Mac app: select text, press ⌘⌥E, and it’s rewritten the way a native speaker would put it. Try it on your own sentence in the live demo.