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Comment on Ask HN: I’m already fluent in English. How can I improve further?

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I’ve been reading, writing and speaking English

Error! Missing oxford comma! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

In all seriousness, your post reads better than most native speakers.

If you're writing something formal, and you're unsure if something is technically correct, find a style guide you agree with and consult it. The journalistic styles are intended to be clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Stylebook

There are many style guides: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style_guide#United_States

When I'm struggling with a sentence, I make sort of a mental graph of the sentence and apply rules (usually around commas, and mostly without thinking, it just happens). I think it's because I was trained as a kid with these diagrams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_diagram

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_usage_controversies is a useful list. Most speakers are bad at one or more of these. I was never able to train myself to pick out a split infinitve, for example, but I would be able to if I were better educated.

Also, Grammarly is an AI thing that's supposed to detect and correct, but I haven't used it. It's quite popular with the kids these days, so they'll probably be dictating what "english" is if they get big enough: https://www.grammarly.com/

You might also not want to speak perfect English. Most Americans certainly don't. What I mean is, is that a "double copula" is technically "wrong", but it does convey extra information and give a cadence and a degree of informality. English has lots of little choices like that.

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