With these articles and tutorials, you can improve your English grammar, both on and off the TOEFL.
The conditional mood is one of those really cool, expressive aspects of English. The flip side of that, unfortunately, is that it can also be pretty confusing to decide which conditional form best fits your situation, and then to formulate it properly. Since a lot of the open-ended questions on the TOEFL will require you […]
I’ve already told you about the use of “the”. “The” is tricky— a single word with six rules of use. I’m happy to tell you that using “an” and “a” is simpler. There are just three rules for using these two words. Rule 1: Use “a” and “an” only before singular nouns. Plural nouns […]
“The,” as you know, is a very common word in the English language. And this word is a wonder to behold! How can one tiny word be everywhere? And how can using this one tiny word be so tricky ? “The” belongs to a special group of words known as “articles” or “determiners.” (The Magoosh […]
Most of the verbs in the English language are action verbs that describe what a subject does. When an action takes place in the real present, use the present continuous tense. You can do that right now by saying “I am reading David’s blog entry.” There is a smaller group of verbs in English called […]
Forming simple present verbs is — well — simple. You use the base form of the verb, and modify the verb depending on whether the subject is singular or plural. (Either by adding /s/, or making other changes, in the case of irregular verbs.) However, when it comes to actual use, simple present is anything […]
Many philosophers and motivational speakers talk about the importance of living in the present. A lot of people would agree. However, when I hear this, all I can think is “which present”? As many English teachers and English students know, there are many different ways to describe the present. In English, there are four present […]
We all love giving advice, although we don’t always love receiving it. It’s an important part of relationships and every day conversation. So, in the following lesson, you will learn how to give advice in English using the modal verbs “should” and “would” and the structure “why don’t…?” Our advice right now is to get […]
In this post, I’m going to write about some commonly confused prepositions and expressions that we use to talk about time. For the sake of simplicity, the post is broken up into three sections, each of which deals with one set of easy-to-confuse prepositions. For, since, and ago For refers to the amount of […]
(NOTE: The TOEFL books that Magoosh reviews and recommends reflect the older, pre-August 2019 version of the test. As of this writing, there are no TOEFL prep books that reflect the newest version of the test. Fortunately, older-format books are still very useful in prepping for the current TOEFL. For details on this, see Magoosh’s […]
Lately, I’ve been dealing with what makes a sentence and what doesn’t. As we’ve dealt with run-on sentences (How Not to Write a Sentence – Run-On Sentences) and sentence fragments (How Not to Make a Sentence – Sentence Fragments), we’ve talked a lot about conjunctions and how to use them properly. Since it’s a slippery […]
