Language Use: Grammar, Vocabulary, Punctuation
What is tested
Language Use questions in Paper II ask you to correct, complete, transform or choose - verb forms, agreement, articles, prepositions, word formation, synonyms and collocations, and punctuation. The section rewards precision rather than volume.
Rules worth drilling
- Subject–verb agreement: find the true subject, not the nearest noun. “The box of chocolates was…”, not “were”.
- Collective nouns (team, family, government) take a singular verb in British English unless the members are acting individually.
- Keep tense consistent within a sentence and a paragraph; watch time markers such as “since” and “by the time”.
- Uncountable nouns - equipment, advice, information, furniture, news - take no plural -s and a singular verb.
- Word formation: decide the word class the gap needs from its position (adjective before a noun, adverb modifying a verb).
- Punctuation: a comma cannot join two main clauses - use a full stop, a semicolon or a conjunction. Apostrophes mark possession (the students' work) or contraction (it's = it is), never a plural.
Worked example
Sentence: “The team of players were told to bring their own equipments.”
Reasoning: the subject is “team” (singular), so the verb is “was”; “equipment” is uncountable, so no -s and no “an”. Corrected: “The team of players was told to bring its own equipment.” Note “its”, not “their”, because the team is treated as one unit.
Traps that cost marks
its/it's, their/there/they're, affect/effect, practice/practise, fewer/less; comma splices; apostrophes in ordinary plurals (“CD's”); missing capital letters on proper nouns and sentence openings; rewriting a sentence that was already correct when the task only asked you to identify it.