Let's Dust off the Temple for some general writing advice.

 First post of 2025!  

Nowadays, I don't have the opportunity to do much IELTS feedback, paid or volunteer. Instead, I'm teaching at an international high school, where English is spoken all the time, and the way I teach English would vary somewhat from what I do for IELTS candidates. 

That said, one thing that isn't all that different about the English I look at now vs. in the past is in the most common errors that are made. Teenagers make the same kinds of language mistakes as adults, and there are a few general types of errors that show up consistently and over time. 

The Big Four:

1. Article errors (a/an, the, Zero)
2. Repetitive structures (overuse of "be")
3. Plurals - (subject/verb agreement primarily)
4. Countable/Uncountable Nouns

I throw a fifth one in here - spacing of punctuation marks - but that seems to mostly be a Myanmar thing. 

How better than to communicate these trends than to "monsterify" them into creatures with a little help from generative AI. 




Once I  had created this menagerie, I had to let them speak for themselves.