Four patterns, and the third one lets English talk about things that did not happen — which is a stranger ability than it sounds.

English has four ways to talk about the past, and the difference between them is not when something happened but how it connects to now.

Nobody writes “he go”. The errors happen when words come between the subject and its verb, or when the subject is not what it appears to be.

You read what you meant, not what you wrote. Every reliable technique is a way of interrupting that, and none of them involves reading more carefully.

Fragments, one-word paragraphs, sentences starting with conjunctions. The difference between a device and an error is whether the reader can see it was deliberate.

Formality is not a scale from lazy to correct. It is a set of choices about vocabulary, sentence shape and distance, and matching it wrongly costs you either credibility or warmth.

One idea per paragraph is the rule everyone knows. What matters more is that the first sentence tells the reader what the paragraph will do.

“Furthermore” and “moreover” are usually signs a writer has lost the thread. Real transitions come from the order of your ideas, not from a word list.

A cliché is not wrong. It is invisible — the eye slides over it, and whatever you meant slides past with it.

Items in a list must share a grammatical shape. Break it and the sentence stumbles in a way readers feel without being able to name.